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CONTRIBUTIONS TO 
GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN 

(Repridt^d from Norm*,!' Colt-ege New^) 



MARKS. W. JEFFERSON 
Michigan State Normal College 



VrSILANl'l, I91'6 
E SCWABl TAG, LA.'B^l 



MATERIAL FOR 
GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN 



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MARK S. W. JEFFERSON 
Michigan State Normal College 



YPSILANTI, 1906 

PRKSS OF THK SCHARF TAC, LABEL & UOX CO. 



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MATERIAL FOR GEOGRAPHY OF MICHIGAN 



MARK vS. W. JEFFERSON 
Professor of Geography, Michigan State Normal College 



The chief material offered is the series of diagrams, to which much atten- 
tion may be given. The text serves mainly to interpret them and aids to 
picture conditions prevailing over wide areas. Any teacher should go to the 
diagrams for the facts of the home locality in which she teaches; to the relief 
map for her height above sea level and the character of the surface of her 
neighborhood; to the map of extent of Michigan for other illustrative exer- 
cises of the same sort in other directions. The diagrams are capable of being 
read for any locality in the region or for all localities; how high, how smooth 
or rough they are, what sort of rocks or soils are probably prevalent there, 
how cold it is there in winter and how hot in summer, what grows there, how 
thickly settled, when settled. Whatever things can be shown in their rela- 
tion to the environment gain an importance for geographic study that may 
not be intrinsically theirs. Very important characters of Michigan that can- 
not be shown to be related to configuration, soil or climate have no present 
value from a geographic point of view. Michigan is truly a group of people 
and not a portion of North America, yet such is not a geographic point of 
view. This must concern itself with the part of the earth that Michigan 
occupies and in how far its life is affected by its home. If this is borne in 
mind, it will perhaps explain the lack of some things about the state that 
might be told here. 

In connection with the paragraphs on Physiography, students are referred 
to the admirable report of the state geologist for 1904, just issued, and to 
Taylor's Short History of the Great Lakes, in "Studies in Indiana Geog- 
raphy," Inland Publishing Co., Terre Haute, Ind. 

Authorities for the relief map are: Frank Leverett for the lower penin- 
sula and the country to the southeast; U. S. relief map and Gannett diction- 
ary of altitudes for Minnesota, Wisconsin and upper peninsula ; and the 
Canadian dictionary of altitudes for Canada. 

Michig-an is a large state with great natural resources, 
likely in the future to support a population little inferior to 
the greatest of the United States. Massachusetts has today 
a population of nearly three millions; Michigan with seven 
times as much territory, and richer territory, should some day 
have twenty millions within her boundaries. In a new coun- 
try like ours the near places are first occupied, the easy things 
first done. It is for this reason and the great importance that 
contact with Europe has had for us in the past that the states 
of the Atlantic seaboard have proceeded so much further in 




developing their resources than the newer communities of the 
west. There are today 18 states larger than Michigan, but 
most of these are west of the 100th meridian and many of 
them limited for human occupancy by insufficient rainfall. 
In parts of our state the rainfall is light, but everywhere 
sufficient for agriculture. If a circle be drawn with its center 

at the southeastern corner of Mich- 
igan large enough to extend across 
Isle Royale, it will also include 
New York, Washington, Rich- 
mond, Va., and Raleigh, N. C. 
The radius of the circle would be 
five hundred miles. No state has 
so long a coast line. None has a 
greater variety of valuable re- 
sources. Lying far to the north 
the lakes save it from the rigor of 
Fig 1. Extent of Michimn an interior climate, yet is it in 
that invigorating zone of the spells of weather, now warm, 
now cold, now wet, now dry, in which are found the most 
prosperous and progressive peoples, the world over. 

Our state is a part of the physical region of the great 
lakes. All parts of this area drain to the St. Lawrence river; 
all parts enjoy the milder climate that comes from the pres- 
ence of these great bodies of water, loth to heat up under the 
sun of summer and equally slow in winter to yield up what 
warmth they have. The great economic distinction of the 
region lies in the enormous transportation possibilities of broad 
and deep water ways between the pass over the almost imper- 
ceptible divide at Chicago leading to the Mississippi basin 
and the prairie states and that in the Mohawk valley leading 
to the Atlantic seaboard and to Europe. It is no coincidence 
that the growth of the Northwest territory has been parallelled 
by the expansion of New York, the only Atlantic port con- 
nected by an easy pass with the interior of the continent. We 
observe at once that to study the physical aspects of the state 
we must consider a wider area than state or country. The 



political boundaries by no means coincide with the natural 
ones. This is true from every point of view from which we 
consider the state. We can never let ourselves be stopped by 
the state or national boundaries. 

There are, however, striking contrasts between the north- 
ern and southern parts of the region, and Michigan, like Wis- 
consin and Ontario, lies in both northern and southern zones. 
The northern zone is a region of forests in which wild animals 
still abound, of thin human population, of scattered pockets 
of thin soil among frequent rocky knobs, a region where rocks 
are everywdiere in evidence, hard and complicated in structure, 
and abounding in iron and copper. This zone is well shown 




Fig. 2. Old hard rocks in (lie north 



on diagram 2 of "Old hard Rocks." It includes northern 
Ontario, northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota and the 
western part of the upper peninsula of Michigan. Of this 
territory Michigan has about 7,000 square miles, with 150,000 
inhabitants. 

South of this is a region of deep soils, of agriculture and 
of denser population. It stretches across peninsular Ontario, 
southern Michigan and Wisconsin and the northern parts of 
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. This zone is well shown on the 
diagrams of population and all those representing farm ani- 
mals and farm products. 

The earth is a great ball of rock. When no rock appears 
at the surface a moderate boring always reaches it beneath and 
in some countries, like our northern zone and Norway, it 
forms the greater part of the visible surface. Along the north 
shore of Georgian Bay the trees in summer are unable to 
mask with their green leaves the brown of the ledges between. 
Soils begin with the decay of the rock under the action 
of the weather. In the mountains this decayed rock may be 
washed down the slopes by the rains as fast as it forms and 
the rocks remain bare, but in most places the rocky core of 
the earth soon becomes buried beneath this coating of decayed 
rock. If you take up a handful of dirt you find bits of the 
rock in it, but in the southern lake zone the bits of rock found 
in the soil are often quite unlike the ledges buried beneath. 
Many of them are plainly bits broken from the hard rock 
ledges of the northern zone. So are the common field stones 
that have afforded so much excellent building material in the 
southern zone. We learn from this that the northern zone is 
thin of soil partly because much of its rock waste has gone to 
the southern region. This was done by the ancient glaciers. 
In the northern zone only firm rock was left and this often in 
knobs and ridges, rounded, smoothed and grooved by the 
passing of the ice. One of these knobs near Marquette is 
shown in the picture. 

These rocks of the upper lake country are among the 
oldest in the world. They have existed much in the present 




Fig. 3. Knob of Greenstone Schist near Marquette. Mich. 

condition since a period when nothing lived upon the earth, 
not even the sea weeds and sea creatures that were the earliest 
forms of life. The landscape must have been barren and 
brown, dreary and monotonous in the extreme, everywhere 
naked rock and dirt, without any green thing to rest the eye 
or moving insect, bird or animal to interrupt the stillness. 
The great beds of copper and iron ore that are the wealth of 
this district today are due to the concentrating action of the 
weather through the enormous length of time that they have 
been exposed to the elements. The deep soil of the south 
has resulted from the addition to its own rock waste of much 
waste from the north. Naturally the people of these two 
regions do different things for a living and probably they 
always will. There are great differences, too, in the rocks 
that underlie the soils of the two zones. When we call the 
northern rocks hard rocks we are using a name that covers a 
great variety of kinds. Hard they all are, and very old, per- 
haps there are no older rocks on the earth's surface; some are 
granite like, with large crystal grains of different shapes and 
colors. These usually have no layers in them. Others are 
in layers commonly a good deal bent and twisted and others 
where freshly broken have an appearance not unlike a broken 




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surface of glass or pottery. But the Ijest way to get an idea 
of these rocks is to look at them in the field stones. In 
northwest Michigan they abound in the ledges and in the rest 
of the state they have been so much used for underpinnings 
that they are easy to see. 

Such ridges are shown on the relief map in the Copper 
range, backbone of Keweenaw peninsula, the Mesabi range 
near the 48th parallel west of Lake Superior, where are the 
greatest iron mines of the world, the Porcupine Mountains on 
the south shore of the same lake, just east of the 90th 
meridian and the mountains on the 88th meridian west of Mar- 
quette. In all these hills and ridges of the mineral country 
rock is everywhere in evidence. In the hills of the southern 
peninsula rock can only be reached by boring, and the boring 
would be deeper on the hills than in the valleys. 

The weatherinof and wastintj of these ancient rocks is 



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Fig. 5. Nor/c Falls, nrtir Hinlmr Bench 



10 

work that was done long before the time of the glaciers, 
which merely did the final chiselling and sandpapering. 

Under the deep soils of the southern region are other 
rocks. This picture, fig. 5, of a creek falling into Lake 
Huron on the eastern side of the thumb of Michigan, with 
the waters tumbling down over the edges of the rocks shows 
how they lie in smooth flat layers like the leaves of a book. 
Here and there they are a little uneven, their edges are usually 
much frayed and worn, as if the book had been badly handled. 
One of these layers — the hard Niagara limestone — forms, with 
its slightly upturned edge, a long line of peninsulas and islands ; 
between Erie and Ontario, where it gets its name from the 
famous cataract that tumbles over it, — in the high land 
running across the province of Ontario and ending to the 
northwest in the peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian 
Bay, in Manitoulin and Drummond Islands, in the eastern 
part of the upper peninsula and the long points that separate 
Green Bay from Lake Michigan. The great leaf whose edges 
form this long ridge extends under Lakes Huron and Michi- 
gan, passing under lower Michigan perhaps a mile beneath 
the surface of the lakes, in a shallow basin form, shallow 
because it is three hundred miles wide to one mile deep. 
A bit of tin three inches wide and bent down a hundredth 
of an inch in the middle would represent its shape very well. 

Inside the hard Niagara ridge the Monroe rocks came to 
the surface where are now the basins of Lakes Erie, Huron 
and Michigan. These lake basins are believed to be due to 
the softness of these rocks, limestones, themselves easily dis- 
solved by rain water, and containing layers of still more sol- 
uble salt and gypsum. Bits of these rocks occur still above 
water, as Mackinac Island and the mainland of St. Ignace 
and the shores and islands about the western end of Lake 
Erie. 

The layered rocks of the southern zone were formed as 
sands and more or less limy muds on the bottom of an ancient 
sea which opened southward to the Gulf of Mexico, and had 
the hard rocks of the northern zone for their northern shore, 



11 

and also for a floor under them. The material worn from the 
hard rocks in their long exposure to the elements was washed 
into this ancient sea and went to form the sandy and earthy 
layers of the southern zone of rocks. This old sea itself lasted 
a very long time. Its shores were not always in the same 
place, its waters not always of the same depth. The limy 
layers must have been formed when the water was clear. Had 
there been any mud in it this would have settled to the bottom 
and left earthy matter with the limy stuff of the bottom. Some 
of the limy layers abound in corals which we may often see in 
the bits of the rock that we pick up now with impressions of 
shelled creatures that lived in the sea at that time. Near 
Alpena and in the Garden Peninsula such corals abound. It 
is by studying the material of the layers and the remains of 
the living things found preserved in them that we learn the 
story of the region. At times the water became shallow and 
broad stretches of briny marsh alternated with pools where the 
salt water evaporated in the sun, leaving deposits of rock 
salt and gypsum that are preserved among the layers of the 
southern zone. This must have been at times when the climate 
was as dry here as today in the Southwest. Later the land 
must have sunk again, for new layers of sandy and limy rock 
are found above the salt. Again for a long time the sea with- 
drew, and broad swamps covered the land. The water must 
have been fresh then, for the swamps were full of plants that 
could not live in salt water. There were ferns and moss-like 
plants, but giant in size, quite as big as our forest trees. Our 
trees, and the plants that flower, did not then exist. From 
these ferny swamps have come our beds of coal, and in the 
coal are numberless impressions of the plants that tell us the 
story. The forests grew old and died, sunk and lie now under 
layers of slate and sandstone ; other similar forests grew later 
above them, and after a long time all have become buried 
under thick rock layers which must now be penetrated by 
shafts to get out the coal. There are many signs in the rocks 
that each rise in the land and each sinking was very slow, so 
slow that no one would have noticed it if he had lived through 



12 

that time, until he saw dry land where before had been 
water. Jnst such slow changes are now going on about us. 
The land at Chicago is sinking at the rate of nine or ten 
inches a century. Of course that is very little in a year, too 
little for any one to notice. It is plain that all these layers of 
rock, with their different conditions and plants and animals, 
have been a \'ery long while making. Perhaps it is easier now to 
see that the hard rocks of the north, which were there before, 
and whose fragments went to form some of the layers, are 
thought to be so old. 

But ages and ages ago, the layered rocks, too, had hard- 
ened from the soft mud and ooze to form solid rock and risen 
out of the old gulf whose waters ran off southward long before 
there were any men on the earth, before there were even trees 
or animals even remotely resembling those of today ; when the 
nearest thing to a four-footed animal was probably a huge 
thing more or less like a frog, at least in his water-loving 
habits. Ever since then the rocks of this region have 
remained dry land, and it is a time so long that we can- 
not measure it at all well. A being who had lived as many 
centuries as any man is likely to live days would almost 
certainly not be old enough to remember back to then. 
Day and night there have been through all the interven- 
ing time, and seasons of heat and cold. Rain has fallen, 
winds blown, and frost followed on sunshine and sunshine 
on frost, racking, splitting and wasting the rocks as they 
are wasting today. Have you ever noticed a marble stone 
in the graveyard? Find one with date fifty years back 
if you can, and see how rough and cracked it is; how its cor- 
ners and edges are rounded and crumbled. Marble is a very 
soft rock, but the hardest rocks must have weathered and 
crumbled a great deal since the remote period we are thinking 
of. No wonder soft rocks, some of them softer than the mar- 
ble of the gravestones and having salt and gypsum among 
their layers for the rains to wash away, have worn into great 
valleys like those of Lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan on the 
Monroe rocks, while the harder Niagara limestone has come 



13 



to project above the country on either side of it in the long 
ridge referred to. No wonder, too, that great quantities of 
that crumbled powder of rock that we call earth or soil have 
accumulated over the ledges for the plants to grow on and 
make life possible to us. 

In the Lake country the differences in the rocks of the 
two zones must have made great differences in the landscapes. 
In the north the long-continued weathering sought out every 
softer bit of the crumpled, disordered rocks, leaving the 
harder parts standing in elevated knobs and ridges. In the 
south the flat layers tend to make the surface level except 
where the streams had carved their valleys. But after most 
of the long time elapsed that separates us from the period 
when warm salt waters reached from the Gulf of Mexico into 
northern Michigan, another great change befell. The sea 
waters had now shrunk back to the shape of the present Gulf, 
North America had much the same outlines on the map as 
now, except that there were no great lakes, — all sorts of lakes. 




Fig. 6. Siiotr on ground Dectmber 27. 1904 



14 




Snow on ground January 10, 1905 



indeed, were scarce then, and many rivers ran in courses 
other than today. Yet it was a long time ago, long before 
the beginnings of history. The change came in with a great 
increase of rainfall, causing Great Salt Lake and the neigh- 
boring hollows of the great basin of Nevada and Utah to fill 
and overflow into the Columbia by channels still plain to see 
among the mountains. Possibly the winter was somewhat 
colder here than now. It is certain that much increase of 
winter snowfall occurred. So great was it that summer heats 
could not melt it all, and accumulation began that grew from 
year to year. Fig. 6 shows the snow on the ground Decem- 
ber 27, 1904. Fig. 7 shows it two weeks later. Where the 
shading is cross-lined the snow was more than a foot deep. 
Evidently it snowed in that fortnight. The snow field grew 
still further. Sometimes it covers even Louisiana for a day. 
Then it dwindles again and fades away northward until in 
March or April all the ground is bare. This is a stagnant ice 



15 

sheet. It lies where it falls until it melts away, snow at the 
top, but before the winter is over, ice below. In days we call 
Glacial, however, it failed to melt all summer long, and year 
after year added a layer, thin or thick we have little idea, until 
it reached a thickness close north of us of some thousands 
of feet, thinning to a southern margin along the (3hio river. 
A curious feature about this huge heap of northern snow is 
that besides crushing to ice of its own weight the whole mass 
flattened down, thrusting its edges outward like a mass of 
pitch. Mr. Willard D. Johnson has imitated this on a small 
scale by cutting away a wooden barrel from the pitch it con- 
tained as it stood on a patch of sand. That pitch did just 
what we have learned by observation that the ancient ice 
sheets did, — flattened down and thrust out its edges, scraping 
and pushing away the sand in every direction. Two hundred 
years ago when the French Academy was earnestly discussing 
whether the earth spheroid was oblate or prolate (flattened or 
pointed), Childrez declared for the latter view because, he 
said, the long-time accumulations of snow and ice about the 
poles must amount now to great heaps there that would add 
notably to the earth's polar diameter. So it would but for the 
property of ice just described of flowing out sidewise as it flat- 
tens down under great pressure. The polar ice caps push out 
their margins which break off and float away as icebergs toward 
the equator every summer, and the snow heaps there can prob- 
ably never reach up more than a mile or two in height. A 
consequence of the flattening out of the great ice heap north 
of us was an enormous sweeping away of all decayed or weak- 
ened rock from the northern region to accumulate in the south, 
forming the deep soils of the prairie states in which now lies 
the center of population of the country. In doing this it blot- 
ted out most of the variety of landscape that the weather had 
wrought in the flat rocks. 

As a result of the drift coating in the southern peninsula, 
the rocks are not much seen there. Whole counties have no 
outcropping ledge. The known ledges are almost invariably 
in the beds of rivers, where they cause falls, and towns grow 



16 

up with suggestive names like Grand Rapids, Big Rapids, 
Grand Ledge and Flat Rock, or at the shores of the lakes as 
at Point aux Barques, on the tip of the "thumb," or in Lit- 
tle Traverse Bay. Deep well borings usually encounter rock 
at a moderate depth, and we have had to learn much of what 
we know about it in this way. 

The rocky "knobs" of the northern country are shown on 
the relief map all about the shores of Lake Superior, where 
the country has been carefully mapped in making charts for 
ships. Hills that are visible from the lake are important to 
vessels, as they serve as landmarks for their guidance. Back 
from the lakes and through all the hard rock country these 
knob-like hills are seen everywhere, but the country is much 
of it wilderness, no good maps exist, and we should not know 
where to put the knobs. Most of them must, therefore, be 
left out of all maps until the country is better known. The 
picture of a hill near Marquette (Fig. 3) gives a good idea of 
them. They should be thought of as dotting the hard-rock 
area everywhere. The smaller knobs and ridges that the 
relief map shows in the lower peninsula of Michigan are of 
sand and gravel, moraines left by the ice sheets as they melted 
away. Their material, like most of the surface of the south- 




FiG. 8. Alorainic hills near Eagle, Wisconsin 



17 

eni zone, is bits of the northern ledges. They are just as 
characteristic of Wisconsin and sonthern Ontario as of Michi- 
o-an, but only in our own state have they been traced out well 
enough to put them in on the map in their right places. 

These knobs and ridges of moraine make most of the 
steeper hills of the southern landscapes. Fig. 8 shows the 
appearance of such moraines. All this material that the gla- 
ciers brought down from the north is known as the Drift. 
Parts of it, especially near the hard -rock country, are too 
sandy for the most successful agriculture. Forests have been 
the best crop there in the past, and may perhaps be made to 
abound there again. Something of these forests is still left, 
as will be shown later. Farther south the land shares the 
excellent quality for farming of northern Ohio, Indiana and 

Illinois. 

That the land is higher as one goes farther north is seen 
by the relief map. South of the Saginaw Valley the highest 
point is a small area over 1300 feet in Oakland county. North 
of the valley quite a large area exceeds that elevation and a 
small region on the boundaries of Osceola and Wexford is 
above 1600 feet. But in the upper peninsula is much land 
well above that level and 1900 is reached and passed north of 
Lake Superior. Peninsular Ontario shows the same ascent to 
the north. The drainage of Lake Superior accordingly goes 
south into Huron, that of Lake Huron south to Lake Erie by 
St. Clair, but Michigan and Erie empty to the north against 
the slope of the land. This is one of the many consequences 
of the glacier work here. Of old the whole region drained 
south to the Gulf of Mexico. Lakes Michigan and Erie are 
now walled off on the south by glacial drift. 



II. 



OLD BEACHES AND MORAINES. 

At the time when great sheets of ice lay on this region, 
the country south of the Ohio was so warm that the ice all 
melted before reaching it. The ice here crept forward, pushed 
by the weight of the mass accumulated mountain high east 
and west of Hudson Bay. But for a long time there was a 
region just south of the great lakes where the ice melted and 
ran off as water as fast as it crept forward. Since the ice 
dragged quantities of drift in its lower portion, causing all 
this region to be coated over with the rock fragments from 
Canadian ledges, all this drift must have dropped at the line 
where the ice melted. Such is believed to be the origin of a 
long low ridge, uneven of crest, and following the outline of 
the lakes at some distance that is traced on the map by the 
heaviest black line on Fig. 9. It is seen that the front of the 
ice was uneven ; that it pushed furthest south along the hol- 
lows now occupied by lakes and bays. Such a ridge of stony 
detritus at the front of a glacier is called a moraine. Lines 
of moraine are numerous throughout the lake country. This 
is one of the plainest. 

As the climate grew warmer the front of the ice retreated. 
That is, it melted back faster than it crept forward. Lakes 
now began to gather between the moraine and the new front 
of the ice, filling the basin with water up to the level of the 
lowest notch in the rim of moraine. There the lakes ran 
over. As all the country to the north was covered by ice, 
hundreds of feet thick, this overflow had to go south, where 
it all found its way, sooner or later, into the Mississippi. 



19 

Many such lakes were formed, with shores and outlets that 
changed as the ice kept melting back and uncovered now and 
then a new and lower notch in the rim, or allowed two of the 
water bodies to run together. Duluth, Green Bay, Chicago, 
Saginaw and Toledo must each have had one of these ice- 
dammed lakes, draining to the southwest and excavating with 
its waters tbe channels in which are the great portages between 
the great lakes and the Mississippi. 

These outlet channels have thus become of great import- 
ance from the cities they have fostered. They are still trace- 
able on the ground. The waves of these lakes cut beaches 
on the slopes of the moraine that held them in. Such beaches 
are traceable from the outlets for many, many miles. One of 




Fig. 9. .yforaine^ and old lake hcachen 



20 

the lakes that has left a very visible beach is traced in out- 
line on Fig. 9 with a black line, the area of the lake that 
made it by cross-lining over the land. At this time the ice 
front had melted far enough to the northeast to uncover half 
of Lake Erie, and the southern third of Lakes Huron and 
Michigan. Lower land was now uncovered on the "thumb" 
of Michigan than on the moraine further south, and across 
this low land the water flowed until its level had fallen to that 
of the Saginaw lake. This in turn emptied through the val- 
ley of the Grand river into the lake at Chicago. The relief 
map shows how the elevation and shape of the land surface 
moulded these bodies of water. The water finally escaped to 
the Mississippi by the valleys of the Desplaines and Illinois. 
A number of such beach ridges are found one above another, 
corresponding to various lake levels, with escape at various 
outlets. The most important line of travel in the United 
States, the Mohawk valley, was in part excavated by the 
waters of the great lakes escaping in this way to the Hudson 
river when the ice had mostly withdrawn from the lakes, but 
still blocked the St. Lawrence channel. 

The waters of the ice-dammed lakes were doubtless kept 
muddy by the silt from the lower layers of the melting ice. 
The fiat-lying clays about Chicago, Saginaw and Detroit were 
formed by the slow settling of these sediments to the bottom. 
The shore ridges and moraines have given the rivers of the 
lake country a curious arrangement (See Fig. 4). The Mau- 
mee, that flows northeastward into Lake Erie at Toledo, 
receives its headwater tributaries much as the shank of a fish- 
hook is met by its barb, the St. Joseph from the northeast and 
the St. Mary from the southeast. Another pair of tributaries 
lower down the Maumee behave in the same way. So the Cass 
and Tittabawassee join the Saginaw, and quite similar is the 
flow of the St. Louis at Duluth, the Wolf river near Green Bay, 
and the Chicago river at Chicago. The tributaries in each 
case are obliged to go along behind the ridge to the place 
where the main stream breaks through before they can begin 
to approach the lake. 



21 



Very different from these are the old shore lines about the 
northern lakes. Here the beach is a strong feature in the 
landscape, rising in distinct terraces from the present lake 
shore, as seen in the picture (Harbor Beach, Fig. 10), and at 
Petoskey and Mackinac island. One of these is indicated on 
the diagram by a solid black line about the northern shores of 
the lakes, with numbers giving its elevation above the lake 
from place to place. The outlet was to the northeast on the 
79th meridian just north of the 46th parallel, across the Cana- 
dian lake Nipissing to the Ottawa river and the St. Lawrence, 
which was now free of ice. It will seem strange that the 
water should find its outlet there where the land is now high 
above the lake, but it is certain that the land in the north 
was lower then than now. The shore lines must have been 
as level as any modern lake shore when made, while now 
they rise higher and higher as we go to the north. The ele- 




HiG. 10. Elevated hencli. Harbor Beac/i. Mich. 



22 

vations of the beach above the lake surface show this. It 
seems a very surprising thing, but it cannot be doubted, that 
the land has risen out of the water in the north without rising 
so much in the south, pretty much as a trap-door in the floor 
rises most at the edge away from the hinges. There are 
many ways of showing that this sort of thing, a rising or 
sinking of land, is happening in many parts of the world all 
the time. It is quite as certain as that the earth is turning 
around on its axis, or that we are swinging around the sun at 
a tremendous speed, and just as hard to realize. The move- 
ment in this case is really very slow and very slight. It 
sounds a good deal when we say the land has risen 100 feet 
more in Georgian bay than in Alcona county, but the distance 
is 150 miles, and the slope of such a tilting only 8 inches to 
the mile. If you go out and stand on a beach that has a slope 
of 8 inches to the mile it looks perfectly fiat. Moreover, it has 
been tilting for a good many hundred years before it got so 
much out of level as that. The movement is neither so great 
nor so rapid as the ordinary settling of the ground that cracks 
the walls of our houses. When those old shore lines were 
bathed by the waves, the basin of our lakes was down to the 
northeast and the lake waters were high at that side. For the 
same reason the Nipissing outlet was lower than the St. Clair 
at Port Huron, and the waters of the upper lakes went to the 
sea without passing through Erie or Ontario at all. In this 
channel from Georgian bay to the Ottawa river there is now a 
low divide between the Nipissing and Ottawa drainage over 
which the early French explorers made a portage in their trips 
to the lakes, for Lake Erie was discovered later. Since the 
day of the old north lakes the basin has been tipping back to 
the south, the northern shores coming higher and higher out 
of water, and the water in the south is steadily advancing on 
the land. 

The tiny lakes that dot the surface of Michigan and Wis- 
consin, thousands in number, are also due to the presence of 
ancient glaciers here. South of the outer moraines of the ice 
sheets such lakes are unknown either in America or Europe. 



23 




Fir,. 11. Sand dunes about the lakes 

They are due partly to hollows amono; the irregular heaps of 
drift left ou the surface of the couutry and partly to the burial 
in gravel and sand of ice blocks from the glaciers as they at 
last melted away and covered the country with streams of 
muddy and sand-laden water. 

A feature of the lakes of which Michigan enioys almost a 
monopoly is the sand dune coast, best developed on our shore 
of Lake Michigan between the 44th and 45th parallels (Fig. 
11). Ontario's fragment is less well developed for lack of 
sand. Wherever a shore that is well supplied with sand stands 
facing the prevalent westerly winds, the sand is flung up on 



24 

shore by the waves of storms and the winds then pile it np 
along the coast in long series of sand hills and hummocks. 
How the wind tends to drive these landward is well shown by 
a prostrate pine in the dune at Pentwater as it appeared in the 
summer ot 1902 (Fig. 12). The tree grew erect above the 
spot where th^ roots are now. The sand in and on which it 




Fig. 12. Dune at Pentwtiler. Mich. 

grew has long ago been blown to eastward. The tree was 
first blown over in the same direction, and before the footing 
was removed by blowing, the tip had become firmly embedded 
in the position in which we now find it. The chief use men 
make of the dunes is to build summer homes on them for the 
coolness of the winds from the lake that piled them up. The 
picture (Fig. 13) shows both the cottages and the strong wind 
in the trees. Sand abounds greatly on this eastern shore of 



25 



Lake Michigan, building long sweeping borders to the land. 
The sand is not merely moved landward up the dune, but 
travels northward along the shore in the play of the waves. 

In this travel alongshore it has swept across the mouths of 
the lower peninsula rivers entering this lake and sought to 
bar them from the lake. Thus each of these rivers has a 
lake at its mouth inside the line of the dunes, and access to 
the Bio' Lake must be maintained bv dredging a channel 




Fig. 13. Houftes on dune. Pentwater. Mich. 

across the beach. Such lakes are admirably shown on the 
chart of Lake Michigan published by the U.S. Lake Survey 
(Campau Building, Detroit, 20c.) characterizing this wliole 
shore line. Ludington has fine examples of the dunes at 
Epworth Heights, and the bar partly enclosing the Pere Mar- 
quette Lake is of this origin. 

Figure 14 shows some of the j^rincij^al ancient outlets of 
the lakes. Those numbered 1 draining the lakes formed near 
Duluth, Chicago and Detroit in the southern and western ends 



26 



of the basins when most of the lake country was still under ice ; 
those numbered 2, leadino^ off the lake waters to the valley of 
Mohawk and Hudson when the ice had bared most of the lake 
basins but still blocked the St. Lawrence , and 3, emptying all 
but Erie at a later period to the great arm of the sea that then 
occupied the basin of Lake Ontario and the valley of the St. 
Lawrence. The discharge of the great lakes is considerable 
enough to wash out a broad, deep channel such as those of 
the St. Clair and Detroit rivers of today, and all these older 
channels, now abandoned by the waters that carved them, 
exerted distinct influence on early lines of exploration and 
communication and upon subsequent history. Abandoned 
river channels always drain their rain water off in opposite 
directions at the two ends with a divide somewhere between. 
The divide in most of these channels is that separating the 
basins of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi, represented in 
the figure by the dotted line. Thus the old channel at the 
west end of Lake Erie drains northeastward to Lake Erie by 

the Maumee and south- 
^- ' - \ lA westward by the Wa- 

bash with the divide 
between these rivers 
where Ft. Wayne now 
stands. In early days 
when travel was by 
canoe, parties went up 
the Maumee from Lake 
Erie, made a portage 
(or carry) across the 
divide and on down 
the Wabash. These 
portages were natural camping spots, which travelers would 
naturally tend to reach before nightlall. Here parties traveling 
in opposite directions would often meet and exchange neces- 
sities, here the trader would often pitch his camp and defend 
his precious goods by a stockade or fort, under whose shelter- 
ing walls clustered the huts ot the half-breed families of the 




Older outlets of the great lakes 



27 




Fig :5. The Hurons (Iroquois) about Lakes 

Erie and Ontario with friendly Alonquin 

tribes inmost of t lie lalce cotiutrn 



voyageurs; here grew up the earliesi important towns of the 
region. Chicago is the best example of such a history. The easy 

portage at this point early made it a pathway to the interior 
of the continent. The French traveled over the lakes to the 
southwest, looking for a passage to the Pacific. Their set- 
tlements were mere forts along this route, utilized later for 
the highly profitable fur 
trade, it is true, but with- 
out real colonization such 
as characterized the Eng- 
lish settlements along the 
Atlantic coast. 

The French first entered 
the lake country by the 
portage from the Ottawa to 
Lake Nipissing along the 
line of the old northern out- 
let. There is no doubt 
they were guided in their choice of this northern route by the 
possession of the lands about Lake Ontario and Lake Erie by 
the redoubtable Huron tribes (Fig. 15), while the upper route 
was through the country of friendly tribes of the great Algon- 
quin family. To these facts is due the importance of Mackinac 
and the Sault Ste. IMarie in the early history of Michigan. 
Mackinac, Sault vSte. Marie, Green Bay, Chicago and St. Joseph 
were reached by the whites long before Detroit. LaSalle did 
not make his first trip up Lake Erie until 1679. The settle- 
ment of Detroit, 22 years later, seems to have come of a desire 
to cut off the English of the New York colony from the fur 
trade ot the northern lakes. Nicollet made the first post at the 
Sault and coasted as far as Green Bay in 1635. Marquette 38 
years later passed over the same route and on to Lake Win- 
nebago, up the Fox river to the Wisconsin by the portage 
where the town of Portage, Wis., now stands. This is a region 
of lakes. In times of heavy rain the Wisconsin sent surplus 
waters down the Fox river to Green Bay. On his return from 
the Mississippi in 1674 Marquette ascended the Illinois and 



28 

Desplaines to theChicago portage. Here, too, the landis very 
flat and in wet seasons loaded boats floated from Lake Michigan 
to the Mississippi. In dry weather they must be carried thirty 
miles In 1679 we find LaSalle at St. Joseph, probably mak- 
ing the portage to the Kankakee from South Bend and getting 
to the Mississippi by the Illinois. It was an explorer's trip. 
He had no map to show how far he was going out of his way. 
As the divide lies just beyond Michigan territory none of these 
old portage towns are included in the present state of 
Michigan. 

Traffic on the lakes then as now largely passed througJi 
Michigan waters between outside points on either hand. The 
portage at Sault Ste. Marie diflers from the others in not stand- 
ing on a divide but at the rapids in which the waters of Lake 
Superior descend to the eighteen feet lower waters of Lake 
Huron, 



Ill 



CLIMATE 



Michigan and southwest Ontario consist of peninsulas 
projectinglnto lakes. A result of this position is to mitigate 
extremes of temperature. Water is slower to heat up than 
land, so a hot day in summer is hotter on shore than over the 
lakes. One of the hottest days of the year 1904 was the 24th 
of August. Fig. 16 shows diagramatically all the highest tem- 
peratures observed in the region that day. The greatest heat 
was, of course, south of the Lakes, wh-re the thermometers 
rose above 90°. Next north of this comes a belt which has 
been shaded with rulings in the diagram, where temperatures 
between 80° and 90° were noted. Two outlying islands of 
this shading are seen in southern Michigan, and three in 
peninsular Ontario. These isolated warm spots lie a little 
back from the lake shores, or touch them only to eastward. 
West-facing shores on both Huron and Michigan are seen to 
be cooled by the winds that prevail here from the west. Erie, 
too, shows something of the same sort. This has brought us 
across the blank to the dotted area of temperatures under /O , 
perhaps the greater part of the coast country on the upper 
lakes In this again lie islands of more than 70°, m Wiscon- 
sin a little back from the lake, and in Upper Michigan, 
whire it only touches the lake shore to eastward as before. 
It would be hard to find a shore on the map where a trip 
straight inland would not bring us to higher temperature. I 
have no doubt this would have been true in the Canadian 
country east of Lake Superior, though the country is little 



30 



settled, and we have no knowledo^e of thermometers there. 
The cooling effect of the lakes is apparent in every part of the 
diagram. Lake Erie, which is barelv 60 feet deep, does not 
cool its shores so effectively as the other lakes, which are 
much deeper. In each of the lakes the water is observed to 
be coldest where it is deepest. Out on mid Lake Michigan, 
near the 45th parallel, there is a patch of cold water, so well 



92 »; so 89 



87 86 fiiS S4 03 S2 ei SO 79 73 




Fig 16. Maximum tem,peratures of the afternoon of Aug. 24, 1904, a very /tot dan .^hawing 

less heat on the shores 

known to masters of vessels that they fill their water casks 
there. This "Cold Island" is over the greatest depth of the 
lake. Out on Lake Superior, far the deepest of all, the water 
keeps a temperature of 39° to 41° in midsummer. Only near 
the shores, where the sun penetrates to the sandy bottom, is 
the water warm. Not only is the effect of these cool waters 



31 



borne to eastward on the prevailino; west winds, but they 
extend their influence shoreward on hot summer days with the 
landward breathing of the lake breezes that then prevail. 

This tempering of 
summer heat by the 
lakes must not be 
supposed to make 
Michigan cooler 
than places east and 
west of it. On an 
average it has about 
the same tempera- 
ture as places in the 
same latitude fur- 
ther from the lakes. 




over 50 45-50 40-45 35-40 

Fig. 17. Mean annual temperature, 1871-1890 



Fig. 17 will make 
this clear. It records 
the average temper- 
atures of the period 
1871-1896 as record- 
ed by observers of 
the U. S. Weather 
Bureau. Neither 
does it mean that 
our summers are 
cool. One time or 
another Michigan 
has known as high 
temperatures as 
southern Louisiana. 
The reader should 
make this out on 
Fig. 18, which shows 
the distribution of p 

the highest temper- „^| 

atures recorded in I*'»g- is. The fn'ohem temperatures recorded from 1S71 to 1896 

eastern North America, from 1871 to 1896. It appears by 



S1I_^^__L^ 


§>«^t>/-4CL 95 \ A/ ^ 




m 

y 100 \ 


1 ^ 


- 100 



S3 c^s 



2>2 



this that neither 
southern Louisiana 
nor Michio^an north 
of the southernmost 
counties have exper- 
ienced greater heats 
than 100° during 
that period. Usual- 
ly, of course, Louis- 
iana is the warmer 
of the two, yet not 
greatly. Fig. 19 
shows the average 
of the highest tem- 
peratures reached 
each July day in 
the 25 years. From 
this we may say that 
the region west of 
Saginaw Bay is like- 
ly to have a tem- 
perature of 75° to 
80° any July afternoon, Louisiana more than 90°. On Jan- 
uary mornings, Louisiana's average is 45°, lower Michigan's 
15°(Fig. 20). For its coldest moments, Louisiana has known 
temperatures from zero to ten degrees above ; lower Michigan 
from twenty-five to thirty degrees below. (Fig. 21). In a 
word, Michigan reaches summer heats on any day in July 
almost as great as those of Louisiana, and the hottest record 
is the same for both places, but January sends down our ther- 
mometers thirty degrees lower than Louisiana's. 

Cold winters and hot summers characterize our climate, 
but as Fig. 16 showed us the great lakes mitigate the greatest 
summer heats along their actual shores. Facts for particular 
localities may be read from the diagrams in the same way. 

In winter the effect of the lakes is reversed. Water can- 
not cool below ^2° . Air below that temperature must, when 




S3 ZZn 



80-85 S5-')L) 75-80 i.iid.-r75 

Fig. 19. Mean of the hottest temperatures observed on 
July days. 1871-1896 



33 

near the lakes, be warmed by radiation from the water. The 
winds should distribute this mitigating effect a moderate dis- 
tance inland from the lake shore. Let us look over, in this 
connection, the diagram of the lowest temperatures observed 




KiG. 22. Minhinun frmperafiirc of the morninu of Jan. 24. 1904. .shoH-iiig les.-i cold 

iicnr the shore 

in January 24, 1904, wheu a cold wave was central in north- 
west Wisconsin. Its effects reached into Ontario, but were 
notably lessened at every lake shore, while the interior of 
Ontario has 10° below, inland parts of the lower peninsula of 
Michigan 15° below, with 35° below on the Wisconsin high- 
lands. These mitigating effects do not indeed reach far from 
the water, but the shore counties have extremes of tempera- 
ture much moderated by them. It is on such days as August 



34 



24, that Chicago people become eager to flit across the lake 
to Michigan shore resorts. Such summer coolness constitutes 
an asset of singular value in that its continued use and enjoy- 
ment does not involve any diminution of future availability. 
In this it surpasses mines, lands, forests, or fisheries, and is 
to be classed rather with beautiful scenery, good institutions, 
and a reputation of citizens for good character. 

In the main our temperatures are of the class usually 




wzzA ^a 1ZZ3 



20-10 



to -10 



Fig. 20. Mean of the coldest iemperatitres observed on 
January days 1S71-1896 




^ ^ ^ 



-20 to -10 -10 to -30 -30 to -40 -40 to -50 

Fig. 21. The lowest temperature recorded 1871 to 1896 



grouped as temperate, because their average values are 
moderate, but their ranging through extremes is their most 
striking character. These extremes occur not merely in the 
transition from day to night, and from summer to winter, but 
also in the spells of weather that sweep in unending proces- 
sion from the Pacific to the x\tlantic, and distinguish our 



35 



weather from the experiences of reo;-ions nearer the eqnator 
The cohimns of nnmbers at 



Mkan Daily Thmpkraturhs, 1904 
Ypsilanti. Havana. 



the side of this page are the 
averag^es of the thermometer 
readings for each of the 
twenty-four hours every day 
in January and July at Ypsi- 
lanti and at Havana, Cuba, 
in 1904. As the eye runs 
down the January values for 
Ypsilanti, it is struck by the 
great changes. In fact, if 
we group the days as cold or 
warm, according as their tem- 
peratures are below or above 
17°, the mean of the whole 
month, it appears to have con- 
sisted of four cold spells and 
four warm spells; cold: 2 to 5, 
10, 17 and 18, and 24 to 29; 
warm: 6 to 9, 11 to 16, 19 to 
23, and 30 and 31. The dif- 
ference from warm spell to 
cold is often greater than from 
day to night. A glance shows 
that Havana lacks such spells 
in summer and winter, while 
our summer shows them much 
diminished. This is seen again by comparing the highest 
and lowest temperatures of the month, Ypsilanti showing a 
difference in winter of 34°, in summer of 27°, and Havana 9° 
and 4°. The same thing is true of the individual days. To 
show this I have selected the coldest and warmest dates at 
each place in the two months, and give now the temperatures 
for every two hours those days, with the somewhat surpris- 
ing showing that not merely is our cold day nearly 65° 



Day 


Jan. 


.lulv 


.Inn. 


Julv 


1 


19° 


58° 


67" 


80° 


2 


/ 


62 


69 


SO 


3 


1 


65 


71 


77 


4 


3 


7i 


71 


78 


5 


7 


73 


68 


80 


6 


21 


67 


69 


79 


7 


26 


66 


68 


80 


8 


32 


70 


70 


81 


9 


22 


69 


66 


80 


10 


15 


72 


68 


80 


11 


IS 


75 


73 


80 


12 


23 


67 


73 


80 


13 


24 


69 


71 


SO 


14 


22 


73 


65 


80 


15 


21 


76 


65 


79 


16 


22 


76 


67 


80 


17 


12 


82 


68 


80 


18 


6 


85 


68 


80 


19 


21 


81 


71 


78 


20 


34 


75 


71 


79 


21 


32 


72 


71 


79 


22 


31 


67 


73 


80 


23 


23 


65 


74 


81 


24 





65 


66 


79 


25 


1 


68 


72 


80 


26 


8 


71 


72 


8(:> 


27 


5 


71 


72 


80 


28 


8 


67 


72 


77 


29 


10 


66 


74 


78 


30 


18 


73 


72 


78 


31 


23 


75 


74 


77 


.Mean 


17 


71 


70 


79 


Lowes 


t 


58 


65 


77 


Highes 


;t 34 


85 


74 


SI 



36 



Hourly Tkmperaturks, 1904. 

Ypsilanti. Havana. 



Hour 


Jan. 24 


July 18. 


Jan. 15 


July 8 


2 


5° 


76° 


61° 


77° 


4 


3 


76 


60 


76 


6 





76 


61 


74 


8 


1 


86 


65 


76 


10 


2 


90 


67 


84 


Noon 


5 


95 


68 


87 


2 


5 


95 


70 


87 


4 


2 


95 


69 


86 


6 


3 


90 


68 


85 


8 


5 


86 


65 


82 


10 


6 


83 


63 


82 


12 


6 


80 


60 


80 



colder than 
their 's, but oiir 
hot one con- 
siderably warmer. 
This would not 
always happen, 
however. The 
July of 1904 was 
2° or 3° cooler 
than usual at 
Havana, and a 
little warmer than 
usual at Ypsi- 
lanti, while the day cited was an exceptionally warm one. 
But all the data given serve to justify the statement that 
our climate is one of hot summers and cold winters, mitigated 
on the lake shores by the more constant temperatures of the 
lakes. But these spells of weather have more in them than 
heat and cold. The warm ones bring most of our rain and 
snow, while the cold ones give us fine bracing days, 
under a sky unsurpassed even in Italy. And though the 
lowering skies of the warm ones are less agreeable, they alone 
make life possible here. As they swing eastward across the 
continent the winds blow in toward them in every direction, 
forming a great eddy often a thousand miles across. Thus it 
happens that it is preceded as it draws near us by easterly and 
southeasterly winds that bring moisture from the Atlantic, 
and then, if it pass by on the north, by southerly winds from 
the Gulf of Mexico. From these most of our rainfall is 
obtained. All of southeastern North America is well watered 
for the same reason, and the lake country lies near the north- 
west margin of this region of sufficient rain. North of Lake 
Superior the annual rainfall soon falls away to 25 inches, a 
scanty amount. South of that lake the whole region of our 
study has an annual fall of rain and melted snow of 33 or 34 
inches, abundant for successful agriculture. The great lakes 
are to be regarded as mighty pools of this rainwater, standing 



37 



awaiting- its chance to run off by Niagara to the sea. From 
their surface it is believed that as much as 20 to 30 inches are 
evaporated annually, and of this there is reason to believe 
some 4 or 5 inches fall a second time on the lake country. 
The lakes do not cause the rainfall on their shores, but they 
may well increase it by a few inches as explained above. For 
this reason rainfall maps of the whole continent show a dis- 
tinct widening of the rainy eastern area toward and over the 
great lakes, which seem to possess the beneficient power of 
enabling us to receive as rain twice over a portion of the 
moisture brought us on the winds from the Atlantic and the 
Gulf. We should now turn to Fig. 23, the diagram of our 
annual precipitation. The data cover the last 25 years, and 
though still imperfect in some parts of the area, the main facts 
are doubtless as represented here. Perhaps the most conspicuous 
feature of the map is the general increase of the rainfall to the 
south, of which we have just spoken. Next to that in inter- 
est come the patches of increased rainfall on every distinct 
elevation that stands to southeast of one of the lakes. The 
relief map in the November issue (Fig. 4) must be referred 
to. The Ontario highland has 40" of rain between its crest 
and Lake Huron. This is some of the water reprecipitated 
from the lakes as is shown by rains at Saugeen and Parry 
Sound, with northwest winds. In our lower peninsula, the 
highlands north and south of the Saginaw-Grand Valley are 
similarly favored on their northwest slopes; the highest point 
of the whole peninsula, in Osceola county, having 40" to 
windward like the slope in the south from Berrien up through 
Cass and St. Joseph, to Branch. Ball Mt., the highest part 
of the southern highland, has a similar increase over neigh- 
boring counties. Similarly, the highland of northern Wis- 
consin has an area of 35", while the Mesabi Range, northwest 
of Lake Superior, will probably be found to have larger pre- 
cipitation than the country about, as soon as gauges are set up 
there, thanks to its considerable elevation. To leeward of 
these elevations are noted the scantier records — under 30" — 
on the thumb of the lower peninsula, and other patches south- 



38 



ward from there to the west end of Lake Erie, as well as the 
west shore of Lake Michigan, from Milwaukee to Manitowoc. 
The most curious adjustment of the precipitation to the topog- 
raphy will be found south of Lake Erie, where the rapid rise 
of the land sends up the precipitation as suddenly from 35^^ to 




HiG. 23. li'iin and snow. Blank areas have from SI) to So inches, dotted areas less than 
30, lined areas from 35 to 40, and cross lined areas over 40 inches for the average 
year between 18S0 and, 1904 

40. The dryer belt extending into Pennsylvanl a between the 
80tli and 81st meridians, coincides with a long valley in the 
upland, an ancient drainage line that is easy to make out on 
the relief map. Newcastle and Pittsburg are the two stations 
in the valley. Further adjustments will be found if explana- 
tions are sought on the relief map for the 40'^ close east of 



39 

the 80th meridian in the same region and the 44'' near 82 
30' west longitude. 

The rain usually comes rather heavier in the growing 
season than at other times, as the diagrams of Fig. 24 show. 
In occasional years this does not happen, and it is probably less 
pronounced in tlie patches to windward of the chief elevations. 



La Cro$.se 

5 10 



Dltroit 



M 



ARQuETTt 



OuLU" 



f'JJ 



jR Haven 

? 'l 



















Lan Sing 
5 II 



Fig. 24. Inches of rain and melted snow that fall in February, March, April, May. June 
July, and so forth, showino that our heavier rains come in summer 

Thunderstorms are the occasion of much of the summer rain- 
fall, but are much less frequent than in the prairie states to 
the southwest. Tornadoes, the cyclones of the newspapers, 
rarely come into our territory. The windfalls of the older 
forests were silent evidences of their occasional passage, and 
a few have been since recorded. 




Fig 25. Pears in 190£ ki.;. 26 Peaches in 1902 

Dark lining over 20, cross lines over 10 and Dark lininu over 500. cross lines over 
light lines over 3 Inishels per square mile 100 biis'.els per square mile 




Fig. 27. Plums in 1902 Fig. 28. Cherries in 1902 

Dark lining over 10. cross lininii over S and Dark Unina over 5, cross lining over 2. light 
tight lines over 1 Inisliel per square mile lines over 1 bushel per square mile 




Fig 29. Straivherries iu 1902 
Dark lining over -'id. ci-dss lininu over 20 
light lines over 10 bushels per 
square mile 



Fig. .'0 Grapes in 1902 
Dark lining over lO.oix) Ihs.. i-mss lines 
over 1.000 lbs., light lines over 200 
lbs. per square mile 



IW 



THE FRIIT HEI/r 



The prevalent west winds from Lake Michigan, with their 
mild, moist air have doubtless made the southwestern coun- 
ties of our state the fruit belt of the region. Perhaps the 
simplest presentation of this fact is in the group of diagrams. 
Figs. 25 to 30, showing the crop of pears, peaches, plums, 
cherries, strawberries and grapes in Michigan in 1902. 
Raspberries and blackberries show the same distribution. 
Three-quarters of our fruit, other than apples, comes from the 
shore counties between Grand Traverse Bay and the Indiana 
boundary (see Fig. 31) and two-thirds from the four southern 



All Michigan ^^^^^,^^^^^^^ ,^„^^^^^^^^^^ a^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^bhu^^^^^^^^^ ^m 

Fruit Counties ^^^■^■^■^^^^^•^^^^^■^^1^^^^^^ m^^^^^^^^^mm^ H^^^^^^^Hi^Hi^ 

All Wisconsin i^^ | 

! 1 I 

Fig. 31. MiUionsoftmsheh of fruit, 1902. The fruits are, for Michiaan—strawberrie$, 
hlackberries, raspberries, peaches, pears, plums and cherries; for Wisconsin— Straw- 
berries, blackberries, raspberries, cvrrarits and grapes, the only ones reported. 
Michiaan grapes are omitted, being only known in potinds 

counties — Kent, Allegan, Van Buren and Berrien. Not merely 
are May frosts prevented from injuring the fruit by mild airs 
from the Lake, but a too early swelling of the buds in March 
warm spells is likewise avoided. Lake Michigan literally 
blows hot and cold or rather warm and cool ; the fact being 
that the lake water changes much less in temperature than 
the land and so moderates extreme temperatures on shore, 
either of heat or cold. Nearness to Chicago markets must 
exercise a very stimulating effect on the crop of the southern 



42 




counties, but the Lake counties of Indiana, Illinois and Wis- 
consin have no share in the business, although still nearer. 
This appears more clearly in Fig. 32 which gives in thousands 

of bushels the 
peach crop of 
the region. 
Only Michigan 
and Ohio give 
the data by 
counties. In- 
diana, how- 
ever, reports 
the number of 
bearing t r e es, 
which are noted 
here for the 
Lake country, 
also in thous- 
ands. Call it a 
tree bears two 

bushels or even three or four, and the inferred yield is still 
far from great. The whole state of Illinois only produces as 
much as the tenth among Michigan counties; Wisconsin not 
enough to report at all. From statements made to me there I 
judge that Ontario produces considerable quantities of peaches. 
It certainly is situated as well as our fruit counties, but no 
statistics are available on this point. The Ohio figures show 
an especially large yield from Ottawa county and this again 
illustrates the advantage of position to leeward of the Lake, as 
Ottawa peaches come mostly from the peninsula north of San- 
dusky and the American islands in Lake Erie. All the facts 
go to show the importance of the west winds from the Lake 
for fruit raising rather than nearness to the Lake or the mar- 
ket. Fig. 30 shows that Van Buren and Berrien lead the 
state in producing grapes; as a matter of fact they produce 
twenty-seven million of the state's thirty-four million pounds 
(see Fig. 33). So California, under the west winds from the 



Fig. 32, Thousands of bushels of peaches, 1902 



43 



Pacific, is far in the lead of American states as grape and wine 
producer. Similarly situated are Chile and Peru, the finest 
grape countries in South America, and Portugal and the Bor- 



10 



20 



30 



All Michigan 
Fruit Couuties 



Fig. 33 Millions of pounds of n rapes, 1902 



deaux country in Europe. It is not the least interesting fea- 
ture of the study of the home country that it quickly leads us 
to see things abroad in a clearer light. Our fruit industry has 
had great developments in the last few years and its adjust- 
ment to geographic features seems to assure its future as long 
as the central states are the seat of a great population. The 
imperative need of the present is prompt and economical 
refrigerator car service to the markets. Fro.n an examination 
of Detroit market prices it is certain that this crop was worth 
on the farm from three to four million dollars in 1902. 

The apple crop, worth over five millions, was much more 

scattered. Apples are raised 



with us wherever men live, 
their keeping quality making 
them a significant item of 
food for home consumption 
as well as for marketing. 
The principal sources of the 
crop are shown in Fig. 34. 
The fruit belt produced but 
sixteen percent of the whole. 

SUGAR BEETS 

FIG 34 Apples in 1902. Dark lining, more Not a little of the hundred 
than 900, cross lines more than 600, ami „,:ii;^„ rlnllar«; worth 

lioht lines over SOO bushels per square mile and fifty milUon QOliarSWOrin 

of vegetable products of Michigan enters into manufacturing 
processes, which add another hundred and thirty million of 
dollars to their value. Usually these manufacturing processes 
have followed on the farm and forest occupations and have 




44 



been located near the supplies of raw material. The diagram 
of wheat production shows that the breakfast food factories of 
Battle Creek are in the heart of the wheat country. Grand 
Rapids, too, grew into eminence as a furniture center while 
still in the belt of abundant hardwood lumber. The lumber 
is now mostly cut off and large supplies are imported from 
outside the state. 

The beet sugar industry differs from these in that the 
beets are raised to ship to some factory rather than the factory 
placed where beets are raised. This tends to concentrate the 
sugar beet farming as no other agricultural product is concen- 
trated. The diagram (Fig. 35) shows the large production of 



i3 91 90 



aa S7 66 85 S4 83 8i 



aO 79 79 




Fig. 35. Sui/ar beet crop of 1903. Darkest shade is 140 tons to a square mile, then 60, 20. 
and 2 tons. Circles are factories 

the Saginaw valley along a line of dense population, and a 
diminishing production as one recedes from Bay county in any 



45 

direction. Bay county, where the industry now centers, is 
rather north of the best farming country for other products, as 
the other diagrams show. For the present, beet raising is 
largely centered about the larger factories. This is because 
of the newness of the industry in the state. Only California 
up to 1904 and Colorado in that year produced more beet sugar 
50 100 150 200 250 

U. S.. cane ^^^•^^^^^•■^ ^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^i^^^i^ ^^^^^^^m^^ ^^^ 

I 
U.S.. beet '.— ^^^— ^^-.^— .^_ .^.^^^.^_ ^^_^^^_ __ 

California, beet ^i^^^^—a^^ ^^ 



Micliigaii. beet 



Fig 36 Siii/arcroi} in tftousamls of tons in 190S-4, Mirhi(j<in'x banner year 

than Michigan, which makes about a quarter of the total quan- 
tity produced in the United States. Even including the cane 
sugar of Louisiana, Michigan is the third producer in the 
Union, and cane sugar is rapidly losing in importance the 
world over. In 1854 there were but 182,000 tons of beet 
sugar produced in the world. In 1904-5, of a total world-pro- 
duction of nine and a half million tons of sugar, five million 
were made from beets. Michigan built her first sugar factory 
in 1897. In 1903 she produced 57,064 tons of beet sugar in 
twenty factories; in 1904, 46,659. All the world has benefit- 
ted by the substitution of the beet for cane as a source of 
sugar, as it has reduced the price to one-half that formerly 
paid. The mitigating effect of the Lakes makes Michigan 
favored territory for the beet, from the sensitiveness of the 
plant to the frost. A mean summer temperature of 70° seems 
to be about what it demands. California has its climate tem- 
pered by the winds that prevail from the Pacific. It may be 
that the western counties along Lake Michigan would prove as 
favorable to this cultivation as the Saginaw \''alley. 

AORICULTURH 

The dominant geographic note that appears in all the fol- 
lowing diagrams, as in those of fruit, is their strict limitation 
to the southern two-thirds of the area. We see here a result 
of the twofold geography described in the earliest pages of 



46 

these Materials. Nevertheless, Wisconsin, southern Michi- 
gan and southwest Ontario are great agricultural regions. 
Not quite a quarter of the states of the Union excel ours in 
the total value of their agricultural products. Most of these 
have their whole extent available for farmino-. 

Fig. 2)7 gives the relative values of our main farm pro- 

1,0 ?0 3Q' 

Hay 

Corn I 

Wheat 

Oats 

Potatoes 

Wool 

Poultry and Eggs 

Beans 



Fig. 37. Vulnr of Mkhlann farm prodiirtx. millions of dollars, 1903 

ducts. Fruits, it will be remembered, amount to ten millions 
more and milk and meat to other large items of which the 




Fig 38. Corn in 1902. Darkesl shade. 3200 busliels to 1 square mile, then 
640 and 64 bushels 

value cannot be ascertained. Beans are produced here in 
greater quantity than anywhere in the country. The pepper- 



47 



mint produced from some of the western bog's is of very mod- 
erate total value. 

Perhaps the most instructive of the distributive diacrrams 
is that for corn, I'ig. 38, in respect to the sharp limits to the 
ao^ricultnral country on the north. The sensitiveness of the 
corn to sunshine seems to account for the fairly even east and 




KiG. 39. Wheat in 1902. Darkest shade, 640 bushels to a\ rnue, then 100 
and 64 Imsliels 



west lines that separate the grades of production roughly 
along the 42nd and 44th parallels of latitude. The wheat crop. 
Fig. 39, is much more scattered as well as much less import- 
ant. Here Ontario is seen to excel American territory, lati- 
tude for latitude as well as in its oat crop, Fig. 42. 

Hig.";. ,'5 to •16 are orijiinal diagrams made on the basis of farm and aKricultural statistics 
published by Ontario. Michigan, Ohio. Indiana and Illinois for 190J-3. New York, Minnesota 
and Pennsylvania appear to publish no such data and .Michigan has suspended their publi- 
cation with the year 1902-3. All similar diagrams in the current text-books are copies of dia- 
grams taken from the Statistical .•\tlas of the U. S. Census. Most of these date from the 
year 1890 and the rest, though often dishonestly supplied with later d.ite-, from 190U. and will 
nutil about 1912. None of them include Canadian data. 



48 



Michigan's wheat crop has fallen off steadily since 1880, 
if we make exception of single, unusual years. The acreage 
in wheat in the state in 1903 was little more than half that of 



10 20 



30 



40 



50 



60 70 



80 



90 100 



1840 
1850 
1860 
1870 
1880 
1890 
1900 
1901 
1902 
1903 



Fig 4U. Michiipiii Cere'Us (wheat, orus and corn), hiillio>iS of Itushelts 



1880. This falling off is very likely the cause of the rather 
irregular distribution of the crop with us. In that case 
Ontario is not having the same experience, as the yield there 
is more evenly distributed. How much of this falling off is 
due to diversion of interest, to fruit and stock raising, how 
much to the development of manufacturing industries is a 
subject of inquiry for agriculturist and economist rather than 
for the geographer. It is not due to a falling off in the pop- 



1840 
1350 
1860 
1870 
1880 
1890 
1900 
1305 



1 2 



Fig. 41 Population Micliigan in millions since 1S40 



ulation. The great cereals, corn, wheat and oats are still 
produced in quantities roughly corresponding to the density 
of the population. There seems good geographic ground for 
expecting that considerable crops of grain will always be pro- 
duced here. The market is near, means of transportation 
good, and much soil seems entirely suitable with proper meth- 
ods of agriculture. The demand for grain is permanent and 



49 



bound lo increase. Fi^;. 40 illustrates the combined crops of 
corn, wheat and oats since the state was settled. Fig. 41 
shows for the same period the number of citizens that ])roduced 
the crops. E.xcept for the year 1880, there is much similarity 
between the two diagrams; 1880 may have been an unusually 




Hk; 42. O^/.s- in WOL Darkest shade is ,im) Imsliels to a square mile, 
then 640. WO and 64 Imshels 

favorable year and 1903 an unfavorable one. All such data 
collected and compiled for the single year of the census are 
liable to such accidental influences on their values that make 
them not wholly suitable to use. An average value for each 
ten years would be much preferable. Yet it is clear enough 
from the figures that there has been little increase of cereal 
crops within Michigan territory for many years. Ontario is as 
notable for its oat crop. Fig. 42, as northern Illinois. One 
wonders if the frequent derivation of its citizens from vScotland 
has influenced this crop. 

Potatoes, Fig. 43, are widely grown, none the less prob- 
ablv becaust; they enter so directly into the food of all the peo- 



50 



92 91 JO 69 SO sr 06 &5 04 




91 90 



Fig. 43. Potatoes In 190'£. Darkest shade, 500 bushels to a square mile, then 100 



92 91 PO 69 as 87 



as 64 63 62 61 80 79 76 




91 9Q &<* 66 67 86 65 64 flj bZ 



flO 79 



Fig. 44. Cattle in 1902. Darkest shade is 75 to a square mile, then 50, 25 and 10 



51 



M »j w a» 




91 90 09 88 67 



Fig. 45. Sheep in 1902. Dfirkrsf s/ia<li' .V) tii a square mile, then 2') nnd 10 




Fig, 46. Swine in 1902. Darkest shade 100 to n srjiiare mile, then .',i) and 25 



52 

pie that an effort is likely to be made to supply at least home 
demands on every farm. The best potato yield seems to occur 
well to the north of the reo;ions favored by grain. 

Cattle, sheep and hoos, Figs. 44, 45 and 46, are raised 
about where the cereals are cultivated. Ontario is seen to be 
as successful in stock raising as in raising cereals. There 
seems to be distinctly more sheep raising on the uplands of 
Ontario, of Michigan south of Saginaw Bay, and of Ohio south 
of Lake Erie. Perhaps there will be a future development of 
this industry in the other uplands, in Michigan southwest of 
Grand Traverse Bay and of northern Wisconsin. 

The foregoing should be regarded as a review, not of 
agriculture in this region, but of the geographic distribution of 
its great agricultural staples. They with the kindred lumber 
crop of the northern country represent an annual value of from 
150 to 175 million dollars, now and probably always the main 
natural productions of the state and the basis of industries 
that create the still larger manufactured values. 



IV. 



FORESTS 



When Michigan was first settled it was covered bv a 
superb growth of hardwood in the southern three or four tiers 
of counties, broken only by lakes and occasional openings, 
while northward from this line and across Ontario and Wis- 
consin stretched the finest forests of pine and mixed pine and 
hardwood on the continent. There were splendid trees, hem- 
locks twelve feet around and white pines thirteen to fifteen 
about, three feet above the ground and rearing their summits 
sometimes 150 feet in the air. Great groves of solid pine or 
mingled growth of elm, maple, sycamore, poplar and hemlock 
darkening the soil beneath and keeping it free from under- 
growth, alternated here and there with dense wet growths of 
tamarack and cedar, the forest dark but passable, the swamps 
light but trackless, like the occasional windfalls marking the 
passing of storm winds that were fortunately rare, but each 
one recorded in an overthrown part of the forest. Of this 
great forest the pine is mostly gone. Probably the Ward 
estate in northwestern Crawford county has the only untouched 
pine wood in the southern peninsula. Of mixed growth, 
culled over for the little pine it once contained, there can be 
few areas in the lower peninsula finer than the forests of 
southern Cheboygan, eastern Otsego and western Montmor- 
ency counties. Lumbering began at Port Huron in 1833. 
The output of St. Clair county for that year was four million 



54 



feet. The industry crept along the shore into Saginaw Bay 
to the Saginaw Valley that was long the seat of an enormous 
lumbering activity. In 1888, the great year of the business, 
Michigan produced nearly four billion three hundred million 



1850 
1860 
1870 
1880 
1890 
1900 
1904 



10 


2C 


3C 




40 




5( 


) 


60 






























— 

















Fig. 47. Lumber cut In Michiaan, millions of dollars 



feet of lumber, in large part white pine. Since that time the 
product has steadily diminished as the forests have vanished 
before the lumberman's axe. In 1904, over one billion six 
hundred million feet were cut, but of this three-quarters was 
hemlock and hardwood. This product is estimated to be 
worth fifty-four million dollars, but a portion of this value has 
been given in the various processes of sawing, planing and 
finishing the logs into manufactured lumber. Since 1884, 
more than fifty-six billion feet of lumber have been made in 
the state, and thirty-six billion shingles. A better concep- 
tion of the meaning of these numbers will be had when we 
think that Michigan is said to consume two billion feet of 
lumber a year at present. Vast as the cut has been, Michigan 
is still second only to Wisconsin in this industry. The tim- 
ber diagram attempts to show where well informed men believe 
there is now in 1905 the best standing timber in the Great 
Lake region. It is only an estimate. No forest survey has 
been made, except for Wisconsin. The black areas in 
Ontario aud Roscommon and Crawford counties, Michigan, 
are forest reserves, where old trees are preserved or new plan- 



55 

tations attempted. Comparison with the diagrams of popula- 
tion and farm products shows how widely in the north forests 
take the place of the southern farms. In Ontario, the com- 
plete removal of forests in the lake peninsula corresponds well 
with the large farm returns from the same district, while the 
dense forests towards Hudson Bay are in the same region 




Fig. 48. Standing timber in 1905. Cross lined areas have much good lumber, 

single lined and dotted areas have less and less. Forest reserves in IHack. Not 

based on any survey, but the estimate of competent men 

where population and agriculture are alike wanting. The 
lumber diagram shows where the lumber of 1904 has been 
manufactured. The reports being from sawmills, the lumber 
is often reported a long way down stream from the forests 
where it grew, as along the Mississippi river down which the 
logs were rafted as far as Rock Island, Illinois. All show 
clearly the transference of the great undertakings of the Cireat 



56 



Lake country from the lower peninsula of Michigan to Georg- 
ian Bay and Wisconsin. It is readily understood that unim- 
proved lands predominate in the north, often more than 90 
per cent of all the area. It is beginning to be realized now 




Fig 49. Lumber made in 1905, Solid circles are Pine, open circles Hardwood, 
and triangles Hemlock. Large marks indicate a hundred million feet each, 
small ones ten million feet. Data from American Lumberman, Jan. 21, 1904 

that much of this land ought to remain unimproved here as in 
the older states and in Europe, that it is not good farm land, 
while it will yield a continuous crop of timber for all time if 
protected from fire and trespass and cut over as the timber 
matures, without waste. 

Of delinquent tax lands, the state has some six million 
acres left on its hands, much of it thin, sandy soil where pine 
grew, where fire followed the lumberman and where agricul- 
ture will never yield a crop of such value as the lumber that 
may be grown on it. It is three townships of this land that 
have been set aside under the protection of the state Forestry 



57 



Commission as the state's first forest reserve. Ontario's 
liberal reserve will be noticed. 

MINERAL PRODUCTS OV .MICIIIG.-VN 

In 1903 Michicran's mines yielded a vahie of fifty-six 
million dollars, much the greater part of which consisted of 
iron and copper. 

One-tenth of the world's iron ore and one-sixth of the 



1S50 


, 






















1860 


~. 






















1870 


— ^ 


- 




















18S0 
1890 


— 


— — 


- 


















1900 


^ma 'WB 






















1901 

























Fig. 50. Copprr iniiu'il in Michiunn. Ihniisamis of to/ta 

world's copper was prodnced that year in this state; ten mil- 
lion tons of iron ore, worth over twenty-five million dollars, 
and ninety-six thousand tons of copper, valued at another 
twenty-five millions. Both minerals come from the Hard 
Rocks of the northern region, where mining is the predomin- 
ant industry. The copper comes from the Keweenaw penin- 
sula that projects into Lake Superior near the middle of its 
southern coast. The so-called Copper Range is easily recog- 
nized here on the relief map. 



1850 
1860 
1870 
1880 
1890 
1900 
1903 



1 


2 




4 


5 






7 !■ 




' n 


- 




















— 























•^m.^^^ 



















FUi. .SI. /roil ore mini' I iit .t/ir/iinnn. niillionn of Ions 



The iron is mined a little further south toward the Wis- 
consin boundary. Both metals are won in steadily increasing 



58 

quantities. At the beginning of 1905, nearly $500,000,000 
worth of copper and more than $200,000,000 worth of iron ore 
had been produced within the state. Up to 1887, Michigan 
was the leading producer of copper in the United States as 
also of iron ore up to 1902. Since those dates she is second 
to Montana in copper and Minnesota in iron, not that her own 
production shows any sign of falling off, but that of the other 
two states has had an enormous increase. Michigan has 
increased her copper output two and a half times since 1886, 
but Montana five times. So our state is mining twice as much 
iron as she did ten years ago, but Minnesota ten times as 
much. 

The Minnesota ranges also belong to the hard rocks of 
the northern Lake region, west of Lake Superior. The 
deposits have the advantage of lying near the surface in great 
dirt-like beds, so soft that it can be taken out by steam 
shovels directly into railroad cars as soon as the surface 
gravels are taken off. Such mining goes faster and is much 
cheaper than the usual process of constructing deep shafts 
and blasting out hard ore. There are still vast quantities of 
this soft ore in the Minnesota ranges, but the quality is not 
equal to that of Michigan ore. The ten million tons of Mich- 
igan ore taken out in 1903 were valued at over twenty-five 
million dollars, while the fifteen million tons of Minnesota 
ore were worth less than twenty-seven million dollars. Cop- 
per and iron centers are all shown on the diagram of mineral 
resources as well as the lines over which the iron ores are sent 
to the coal fields of Pennsylvania, where coal and limestone 
are at hand to smelt it. The whole product passes through 
the canals about the rapids at Sault Ste. Marie and down the 
lakes to Erie ports in lanes as well defined as a path upon 
land. Commonly enough in the season one may see these 
vessels stretching out in a long line to the horizon where 
patches of smoke indicate that still others are beyond. The 
shipping ports, Duluth, Two Harbors, Superior, Ashland, 
Marquette and Escanaba have developed great facilities for 
handling this commodity. The ore is stored in great cribs 



59 



along the dock, from which if falls by its own weight to the 
steamers below. These are built especially to carry ore, and 
are of a type of their own, quite unlike the ocean steamers 
that carry all sorts of cargo. Figure 53 shows this well. The 
engines are well back in the stern, leaving the middle of the 
vessel clear free for the ore that is poured in through long 



9^ 91 90 89 



87 S6 05 S4 SJ S2 SI 60 




91 90 89 88 67 86 85 84 83 M 81 



80 79 



Fig. 5.' Minerals in the Lake country 1904 Solid trianotcf sliorr iron mining 

points, solid circles smelting cities. Dots in circles arc principal shipping 

points. Open triangles show salt product ion, and size indicates importance. 

The large dots in the coal rocks are active mines. Gypsum and cement 

are indicated by name where they occur 

rows of hatches into the hull of the ship which is quite with- 
out the many room-like subdivisions of ocean steamers. This 
enables great scoops, operated by steam, to take out the cargo 
almost as rapidly as they were loaded. Anyone who will 
figure it out how many loads for a 5000-ton vessel there are 
in the twenty-five million tons of Lake Superior ore, will have 



60 

a better idea of the commercial activity of the lakes, especially 
when he adds mentally some thought of the movement of 
grain and lumber. Of course the ores might be carried by 
rail, but at greatly increased cost and the presence of the 
great Lakes between the coal fields of Penns\'l\ania and the 




HiG. .s.i. Z/ffU' Sleaiii('r—t>t. Clair River, Aluy, 19U£ 

iron deposits of the northern lakes is a vast advantage to the 
people of this country, who use immense quantities of iron 
and make a use of copper that is rapidly increasing with the 
increasing use of electricity. 

The last ten years have seen a cement industry spring up 
in Michigan in which the state is already third among the 
United States and the business grows rapidly. Nearly three 



61 



million dollars' worth was made in 1903, not a little of which 
went into the construction of admirable walks in manv a 
Michigan town and village. The uses of cement have multi- 
plied of late years, especially in bridge and building construc- 



1S96 
189S 
1900 
1902 
1903 



— 


2 


— 


a 


— 


— 


- 


8 




10 


12 14 

1 
1 




16 




IS 


_ 



Fic. 54. Cement urrh' h, Mirhiuan. h,nrlrc<ls of fl,onsn,vl.s of barrel. 

tion. There are materials in the marls of the countless lake- 
lets and in the extensive limestone deposits of the state for a 
o-reat future output, and the market is increasing. 

Salt was recognized here from the earliest times. When 
the state was admitted to the Union in 1837, seventy-two 
sections of salt spring land were granted to the new state from 
the National land, providing that they were selected before 
1840. The selection of these lands and the study of their 
possibilities was the first undertaking of Douglas Houghton, 
the first state geologist. This remarkable man recognized all 
the chief mineral resources of the state and pointed out the 
lines for their development. In almost every case, experience 
has proved the wisdom of his plans. The salt springs have 



1870 
18S0 
,1890 
1900 
1901 
1902 
1903 



I 




^_^ 


4 




6 




, 




































^^^ 







Suit iiiiiiiiifitcti/reil 



Mieliiiinn. iiiillioiis of lutrrels 



their origin in the lavers of salt among the rocks that under- 
lie the state. The rainwater, percolating through the soil and 
ks dissolves the salt and brings it to the surface in occa- 



roc 



62 

sional springs. The process of manufacturing the salt is 
mainly one of getting rid of the water again from brine pumped 
up from wells and the great item of expense that of the fuel 
needed to evaporate it. For many years Michigan led the 
country in this industry, but since 1902 she has been second 
to New York. The business has here been growing less and 
less profitable to the manufacturers, being now regarded as 
hardly more than an inexpensive way of disposing of the 
waste wood of lumber mills. In 1903 the product fell off 
from eight to four million barrels and the lead in the business 
went from the Saginaw Valley to Ludington and Manistee on 
Lake Michigan. It is significant that the decline in the bus- 
iness of salt manufacturing has closely followed the decline of 
lumbering, just as the salt block and the lumber mill have 
been associated in their activities. White the decline in price 
has diminished the profits to the manufacturers, the people 
are getting salt for 26 cents a barrel that cost them three dol- 
lars in 1840. If a mine can be sunk 800 or 1000 feet, layers 
of clear rock salt will be reached that may be taken out with- 
out dissolving in water and the subsequent expensive evapor- 
ation. An attempt to do this is now being made near Detroit. 
Coal is a product that is only moderately developed as 
yet. Michigan is the fifteenth state in the Union. But the 
industry is growing vigorously, and may be considered in 
some measure as a reaction of the Saginaw Valley against the 
decline in its lumbering activity. Up to 1895 barely 100,000 
tons a year were mined. At present it is chiefly centered in 
Bay and Saginaw counties, but the coal rocks extend almost 
across the central part of the state, as seen on the diagram. 



11 12 13 



Fig. 56, Coal mined in Michiaan, hundreds of thousands of tons 

It is all soft or bituminous coal, lying in flat layers among the 
slates and sandstones. These coal layers are believed to be 



63 























■ 











the remnant from marsh plants of which fossils abound in it. 
The product in 1903 was 1,367,000 tons worth $2,707,527. 
This is a million dollars more than was mined in any previous 

year. 

Of gypsum, more is produced here than in any other 
state. In total value it is the least significant of our minerals, 
though rapidly increasing. It is quarried or mined at two 
points, near Grand Rapids and at Alabaster near TawasCity, 

Iron ore 

Copper 

Cement 

Salt 

Coal 

Gypsum 

Fig. 57. Value of Michiaan mineral i}rodurl.i. millions ofdollnrx. 190.i 

as the name indicates. Brick clays are widely distributed 
over the state. 

Great as are these mineral resources, none of them come 
up to the value of the annual hay crop, twenty-seven million 
dollars, while the total agricultural product is much more 
than twice as great in value as the whole output of minerals. 
The lumber, too, even in these declining times, is worth 
more than the product of all the mines. The people of the 
state have a more general participation in its agriculture than 
in the mines, which are almost necessarily worked by com- 
panies using capital from many lands. It is said to be com- 
mon enough among the Lake Superior copper miners to have 
holdings in the mines where they are employed, an advantag- 
eous arrangement, but not common in mining life. The 
greatest gain the mines bring to the people of the state is the 
one they share with all the people of the nation, the increased 
availability of these useful substances from increase in output 
and lowering of price. 

MANUFACTURES 

The manufactures of Michigan have depended largely on 
her product of lumber and minerals. Though the lumber is 



64 

now rapidly declining, it still is the basis of the great indus- 
try of the state. Lumber and planing mill products were 
worth $55,000,000 in 1904. Based on the great iron mines is 
the f oundry and machine shop output, in which we include 
Detroit's large business in stoves and furnaces, in all $37,000,- 
000. Flouring mills in the state in the same period yielded a 
product worth $26,500,000, and copper smelting $21,000,000. 
Other great industries are the manufacture of carriages, 
wagons and automobiles, valued at $20,000,000. Detroit has 
seen the making of automobiles grow from nothing in 1900 to 
a sale of 9,000 machines in 1904, a third of the output of the 
whole country. Lansing and Grand. Rapids also have active 
automobile industries. Lansing is reputed to make more 
automobiles than any other city of its size in the world. It 
is the home of the well-known Oldsmobile machine. It is 
said that Lansing has an automobile on its streets for every 
150 inhabitants. The central position of the state, its abund- 
ant raw materials, and suf^cient supply of skilled mechanics 
makes the future of the automobile industry in Michigan look 
very promising. 

An application of the state's lumber product is in furni- 
ture making, in which the state is third in the Union. Grand 
Rapids is the great center in the state, formerly getting its 
hardwoods from the country around, but now going out of the 
state for much of it. The Grand Rapids product is very 
widely and favorably known for its quality. The furniture 
made in the state in 1904 was valued at $18,400,000. 

Apart from the iron ores which go to Lake Erie and 
Pennsylvania, Michigan finishes mucli of her raw materials 
within her own borders. Her industries are well diversified. 
The four chief industries of Detroit in lumber, iron, chemicals, 
and vehicles produce among them barely a quarter of the whole 
manufacturing output of the city. There are then a great 
number of small establishments in many different branches of 
industry whose aggregate product is the bulk of the whole 
product. No state indeed produces and manufactures things 
more essential to modern lite and modern civilization or 



65 

a greater variety of them than Michigan. Grand Rapids pro- 
duces more furniture than of any one other product, vet the 
aggregate of the other industries amounts to more than twice 
the value of the furniture. Furniture making may be the 
greatest one business in Grand Rapids, but it figured in 1900 
for only seven and one-half million dollars in a total manufac- 
tured product of nearly twenty-five millions. 

Battle Creek makes a specialty of breakfast foods, but in 
a total manufactured product of $12,000,000 they represented 
but $5,000,000. 

Saginaw and Bay City have been at one time more nearly 
dependent on a single industry — lumbering. They grew 
phenominally from 1880 to 1890, through the culminating 
period of that business. In the next decade they barely held 
their own. Yet the great developments of coal mining and 
beet sugar manufacturing have done much to make up for 
the decline of lumbering and are ample proofs of the vitality 
of the Saginaw Valley. Both cities are now growing again 
on a basis of prosperity more solid than ever before because 
more varied. Manufacturing is city business. Three-quar- 
ters of the manufactures of the country are made in cities and 
towns. In Michigan population is well distributed through 
the area and so is manufacturing industry. The output is 
greatest in the south where cities and towns are more num- 
erous. Detroit is the greatest producer, (irand Rapids sec- 
ond, followed by Kalamazoo and Battle Creek, but all four 
together produce only $185,000,000 of a total for the state of 
$429,000,000, considerably less than half. How different 
from Chicago which makes three-quarters of the goods manu- 
factured in Illinois! 

The six chief manufacturing states of the country are 
New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio and 
New Jersey, after which comes a group of five states differ- 
ing little among themselves. Of these five Michigan is one. 
In almost every one of the six leading states more or less 
specialized industries are found centered in huge groups of 
population like that at the mouth of the Hudson, which gives 



66 

New York and New Jersey their leading position. The dis- 
tribution of Michigan industry through the state may pass 
with time, but it is an advantage to the people of the state 
while it lasts, for it allows the numerous people who seek 
industrial employment to find it in small communities that are 
large enough to offer social opportunities and small enough 
to make possible a style of life and a freedom that is 
denied to many of those who dwell in large cities. The 
last ten years of the nineteenth century saw a distinct tendency 
all over the United States for industries to grow more away 
from the larger cities than in the preceding decades. As 
Michigan is wholly young in history and development she may 
never see her people concentrated in cities that contain a 
large part of all her people. 



V. 



COMMERCE OF THE GREAT LAKES 



The commerce of the Great Lakes has now reached very 
great proportions. It is mostly grain from the head of Lake 
Superior or Chicago for Buffalo, lumber and iron from Lake 
Superior to Lake Erie ports from which much smaller return 
shipments of coal are made. The routes are all marked on 
the diagram of mineral resources. They are unlike ocean 
lines of travel in all following the length of the lakes. Travel 
here is more along than across. The single exception is the 
railroad ferry across Lake Michigan between Milwaukee and 
Ludington, the only service on the lakes that is maintained 
all the year around. This is operated by the railroads as a 
part of their lines between Wisconsin and the east. 

The water route of the lakes offers cheap carriage of 
goods from the producing west to eastern markets. Minnesota 
and Dakota grain and Lake Superior iron ores have been 
rendered immensely more available by the opening up of the 
passages between the lower lakes and Lake Superior. In 
1895 a ton of iron ore was carried from Duluth to Cleveland 
by lake for 80 cents. The lowest freight by rail was $2,59. 
The ore itself was only worth on the dock at Cleveland $2.80 
Everyone that uses iron is a gainer by lake transportation. 

The surface of Lake Superior is 18 feet higher than Lake 
Huron and Lake Michigan. This fall of 18 feet in the St. 
Mary's River causes the rapids called in French Saitlt (leap 
or fall) Ste. Marie. Here the early missionary explorers had 



68 



to land to carry their canoes aronnd the rapids. Here they 
natnrally encamped and here grew up a fort and trading sta- 
tion ot much importance. Great canals have been built on 
each bank passing around the rapids and provided with locks 
to enable vessels to overcome the difference in level. One of 
these locks is shown in the picture (Fig. 58). It is a part 



i 


1 








i«MiJBiii» 


M 


««*► 


wbf' ^%' ' '^^^DB 




^^^m 






3w^'^ 


'■ 




'I^I^^^^E'^ 




,,-^->~ ." ""^S^s^^^^^^I^Hh 




^^^^^^9m^^^^. ' 




-■'S^^^^^K^M 


-^^ JHH 


.. .-.-^^ 



Fig. 58. Tlie American Locks at the Saull Ste Marie. The nhip has come from Lake 

Superior as now she has come down to the level of the river below the rapids, the 

iiates are being opened to let her proceed southward 

of the canal 800 feet long and lUO feet wide, fitted with strong 
water-tight gates at each end. The upper gates are now 
closed and the boats above it float as always at the level of 
Lake Superior. The gates below are just opening to let out 
the steamer. When they are wide open the gates will fold 
back into the hollows seen in the side of the canal, quite out 
of the way. Half an hour ago the lower gates were shut and 
the upper ones open. At that time, of course, the water on 
which the steamer floats in the lock was as high as in the 
canal above and in Lake Superior. The steamer entered the 
lock and the upper gates were closed behind her. The 



69 

engineers in the building at the left then opened valves in a 
great number of pipes in the bottom of the lock which allowed 
the water to run out into the part of the canal below. ^ The 
steamer was gently lowered on the surface of the sinking 
water until the level of the lower reach of the canal was 
attained. As soon as the gates are wide open the vessel will 
steam off for Lake Huron or Lake Michigan, some other 
waiting ship will enter the lock, the lower gates will be closed, 
the water allowed to enter gently from above through pipes 
in the floor, until the ship is lifted by the rising water to the 
upper level. Then the upper gates will be opened and the 
ship will pass on to Lake Superior. Two such locks in the 
American canal and another on the Canadian side have been 
constructed at an expense of six and four million dollars 

respectively. 

During the nine months of navigation there is an immense 
activity at these locks. In 1904 there were carried eastward 
on these waters between American ports 130,000,000 bushels 
of grain, 21,000,000 tons of iron ore, 1,770,000,000 feet of 
lumber, and 1,000,000 tons of flour; and westward, 14,000,000 
tons of coal. This is estimated to amount to fifty-one million 
tons of freight, of which thirty-one million andlajhalf passed 
through the Sault canals. This is not very different from the 
foreign and domestic trade of the great port of^New York and 
three times greater than the tonnage that passes through the 

5 10 15 20 25 30 



1903 I ' ' N Y. 

(reiKht ____„=._™, ' Sault Canal 

in millions = ■■ '-— Duluth 



of tons 

both 

foreign 

and 



Suez Canal 
Chicaso S. Chicago 



Buffalo 



Cleveland 



domestic I ^^'^°'' 



Suez canal. The figures apply only to the />i^/k of the goods; 
coal, iron and grain are all bulky commodities and of little 
cost. Imports to this country from abroad include many 



70 

materials like silk, coffee, tea and spice, the value of which 
by the ton would be enormous. Thus the New York freight 
is three or four times as valuable as all that passes along the 
lakes. The same thing is true of the Suez canal. Think of 
a shipload of tea. Can you reckon the value of 5,000 tons of 
tea? The charge that the owners of the Suez canal make for 
the passing of steamers is itself about two dollars a ton. The 
canals at the Sault are free to all. The money expended on 
them represents but a small part of the outlay of the govern- 
ment on navigation on the Lakes. The United States, and in 
much smaller degree also Canada, has been constantly occu- 
pied for many years deepening connecting channels, con- 
structing harbors of refuge, mapping the lakes and rivers and 
marking the safe passages by buoys in the water and light- 
houses and range-marks ashore. The harbor building that 
has been done by the national government on the Great 
Lakes is a vast work in itself. Except on Lake Superior the 
American shores of the Lakes are mostly of sands that work 
along shore incessantly in wind-driven currents. Where the 
wind gets hold of such sands, dunes are built, as described at 
pages 23 and 24. The harbors on these sandy shores are 
mostly river mouths where land waters have always main- 
tained an uncertain channel across the beach, rarely more 
than five or six feet deep at the most favorable seasons and 
liable to constant changes of place and depth with the contin- 
uous shifting of the sands. The general plan of improvement 
at these river mouths has been similar to that used in the 
Eads Jetties at the Mississippi mouth, which confine the 
waters of one of the river mouths between narrowing walls 
and cause the current to scour out its own bed. So on the 
Lakes, piers have been built on each side of the natural stream 
entrances at a moderate distance apart and extending well out 
from the shore line, as shown in the picture. This always 
improved the entrance, but a difficulty not found at the mouth 
of the Mississippi exists in the Lakes in the shallowness of 
their waters. The piers across the beach compel the stream- 
ing shore sands to go out around their ends, soon shallowing 



71 

the water there. In the deep waters of the (riilf of Mexico 
this is an immensely slow process, bnt on the Lakes a few 
years suffice to fill np the angles on either side of the piers 
and shallow its entrance with a bar. The obvious remedy 
has been applied of extending the piers further into the Lake 
and many of them have now become so long as to involve 
heavy expense for repairs, the material being invariably 
wooden piling. Sheboygan, Wis., has piers that extend 2500 
feet beyond the shore Hue, Menominee 2150, St. Joseph 2040, 
Milwaukee 1650 and Muskegon 1550. The relief afforded, 




Fig. 60. Piers of hi ncnrdinc Harbor, Ontario, lookinn out. 

moreover, is only temporary. Dredging had finally to be 
resorted to and if continuously applied is an effective remedy. 
Dredging is further necessitated by the demands of modern 
navigation for channels eighteen to twenty feet deep, which 
are not attainable by the unaided scour of any streams that 
flow into the lakes. Besides improving a large number of har- 
bors of the sort, the national government has undertaken even 
greater works in some of the connecting rivers, in the Sault 
canal, the channels leading thence to Lake Huron and in the 
St. Clair and Detroit rivers. A continuous channel of twenty 
feet depth is in process of construction throughout the course, 
from Buffalo to Duluth. A most difficult part of this work is 
the excavation of the bed rock that underlies the Detroit 
river at the Limekiln Crossing near Amherstburg, where drill- 
ing, blasting and removal of fragments has been going on for 
many years. The maintenance of the desired depth at this 



72 

point is rendered more difficult by the oscillation of Lake 
Erie in the wind. An east wind raises the water at the mouth 
of the Detroit river and lowers it at Buffalo and the much 
commoner west winds produce the opposite effects. Thus 
the violent west wind of Nov. 21, 1900, raised the lake at Buf- 
falo over seven feet and lowered it at the Limekilns nearly 
three. At such times a number of north-bound freighters 
may usually be seen tied up below Amherstburg waiting for 
depth of water sufficient to let them pass the Limekilns. An 
automatic gage at this point indicates day and night the depth 
on the crossing in feet and tenths of feet. An important part 
of the government's activity on the lakes has resulted in the 
preparation of admirable charts of all the shores and 
waterways.* 

With all this activity of the United States, it remains a 
dangerous navigation. No day in the lake voyage is free from 
that greatest of all sea hazards, the approach to land, which 
threatens ocean ships only at the end and beginning of a voy- 
age. On the lakes the land is rarely out of sight and for hun- 
dreds of miles navigation is within a few rods or even feet of 
dangers that menace the safety of the ship. 

Over the deeper, colder waters fogs are frequent as a 
result of the chilling of the moisture laden air below its dew- 
point. This, of course, happens oftenest on Lake Superior. 
TheU. S. Weather Bureau has pointed out that fogs are less 
usual on the southern route from the Sault to Duluth, that 
crosses Keweenaw peninsula by the passages and canal at 
Portage Entry, in warmer waters. This route is, however, 
little used, perhaps from the added danger of coming nearer 
land. At the west end of Lake Superior lurks yet a greater 
danger in the great and irregular attraction of the country 
rocks for the needle of the compass. 

It has been well known since the first voyage of Columbus 
that the compass needle does not in most parts of the world 
point to the true north. An accurate map of the variation of 

* The admirable colored maps of the separate lakes deserve to be in every Michigan 
schoolroom. They may be obtained at the Lake Survey office, Cainpau Building, Detroit, 
tor IS cents each. 



IZ 



the compass for the lakes has recently been prepared by the 
Lake Survey and is here reproduced. All places through 



92 91 90 S9 es 67 8« as S4 S3 82 81 SO 79 78 




Fig 61 Lines of f.qual iiiii/netic vir'Kiflon for l'l')J (jlvln:) the num'^ter of deoree.t t/ial the 

compass points east and west of true north t)U the solid lines and the change in 

this variation per year by the ilotirl line, west variation increasinij, 

east (liminishinp 

which passes the heavy line numbered 0° have no variation, 
i. e. the compass at those places does point to the north. 
At a point like Chicago on the line marked 3°e. the compass 
points three degrees east of north, and so of other places on 
the map. The broken lines indicate the number of minutes 
by which the variation is changing per year, westerly variation 
increasing and easterly variation diminishing. Thus at 
Sault Ste. Marie where the variation was in 1905 4° west, the 
annual change is 6 minutes which by 1915 will have amounted 
to another degree. The variation will be then 5° west. At 
some localities near the Lake Superior coast of Minnesota 
variations are as great as 26° east and within 6J0 feet change 



74 

to 6° east. This cannot be shown on a map and, of course, 
is only noted very near shore. Along such a shore the com- 
pass cannot be relied upon. 

It is possible for vessels drawing less than fourteen feet 
of water to pass from the lakes to the St. Lawrence and Europe 
by making use of the Welland canal around Niagara through 
Canadian territory. The passages both in the canal and the 
river are narrow, difficult and dangerous and accidents are so 
common that insurance for ships going over this route is very 
high and the traffic does not pay. The small size of the ves- 
sels that can be used in it is another difficulty. The largest 
ships that can pass the Welland canal are of about 3,000 tons, 
and a 3,000 ton ship can never carry goods so cheaply as the 
great ships built for the ocean freight, some of which are now 
of 23,000 tons. 

But it is perfectly feasible to deepen the Welland canal 
and the channel of the St. Lawrence so that the largest ves- 
sels can pass. If that is ever done the lake ports will be put 
in direct communication with the sea, at least in the open season. 
The dangers of this long course of inland navigation must al- 
ways, however, far exceed those of the open ocean. Perhaps this 
extra hazard will always offset the cost of an extra handling 
involved in shipments of western goods from Atlantic ports. 

Great as the carriage of Michigan lumber and iron on the 
lakes is, most of the lake-carried goods move between points 
beyond the territory of the state. But the existence of this 
vast and ceaseless traffic gives the state facilities of transpor- 
tation that encourage the growth of her industries and she 
shares with her sister states in the development and cheapen- 
ing of these great natural resources for feeding and housing 
the people of the land. 

LAKE NAVICxATlON IN WINTER 

Through navigation on the Great Lakes is usually sus- 
pended in January, February and March, on account of ice in 
the connecting rivers. Probably none of the lakes freeze over 
solid, but the bays do and St. Mary's river at the Sault is 



75 

generally crossed on foot in January and February over the 
ice. Put-in Bay and Kelley's Island in Lake Erie usually 
have team connection with the Ohio shore for a longer or 
shorter period in February and so does Mackinac Island with 
St. Ignace. 

Communication between St. Ignace aud Mackinaw City 
is kept up by train ferries through the winter across the Straits 




Fig. 62. A Lake Michhinn car ferry li'ittlinu u-illi Die ice 



76 

of Mackinac. Detroit and Port Huron maintain a hardly 
interrupted service across the Detroit and St. Clair rivers by 
train and other ferries. Lake Michigan, too, is crossed 
throughout the year by powerful train ferries between Luding- 
ton, Frankfort, Grand Haven and Wisconsin ports, but pas- 
sengers are not much carried by this route, the service being 
a good deal interrupted by the drifting of ice floes on the 
westerly winds against the Michigan shores, as shown in Fig. 
62. For great fields of ice form along the shores in quiet 
weather, which are driven out into the lakes when the wind 
rises. At times these fields are so extensive that no open 
water can be seen from the shore. In the bays the ice remains 
firm most of the cold season. In Green Bay, Grand and Lit- 
tle Traverse Bays and Saginaw Bay the ice cover enables much 
fishing to be carried on through the ice. Shanties are built 
and little villages of the fishermen occupied on the ice all 
winter long. Occasionally these men stay too long in the 
spring and the warm south winds melt the shoreice and leave 
them drifting on a more or less rotten ice fioe. Many lives 
are thus endangered every year and occasionally some are lost. 

PEOPLING THE LAKE COUNTRY 

Michigan is a part of the earliest addition to the territory 
of the original thirteen states. The region was known as the 
Territory northwest of the Ohio river. It was ceded by Eng- 
land in 1783 at the close of the Revolutionary war, but had 
been British ground barely twenty years. For this reason the 
old English place names that abound in New England are 
wholly absent here, their place being taken bv French words. 
The French trails that crossed it in many directions between 
the St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico were protected here 
and there by forts from the savage Indians who were the real 
inhabitants. Of Europeans there were barely 4,000 in the 
whole territory, between French and half-breeds. These were 
grouped in three settlements; one at Detroit, where a fort had 
been built by the French to keep the English in New York 
from ascending the lakes in the pursuit of the fur trade, in 



11 

which they were serious rivals, and the other two at the Illi- 
nois towns near St. Louis and at Vincennes on the Wabash. 
The British had put an officer and a few troops in each of 
these posts at the close of the French and Indian war, in 1763, 
and from them fitted out foraging parties of Indians against 
the frontier settlements of Pennsylvania and Kentucky through 
the Revolution till Captain George Rogers Clark invaded the 
territory from Kentucky, capturing the Illinois towns and 
Vincennes in 1778-9. The Americans held them from that 
time on, but though the whole territory became American by 
treaty in 1783, the British were able to put off giving posses- 
sion at Detroit till 1706 by reason of the distance from the '7*?*> 
principal seats of population of the young nation and its 
weakness. Congress planned to divide the territory into three 




Hk; 63. 'L'l\e Sorllni^est TerrUori/. Heavy north and 

south lines diride it into three states as sum/ested ()>/ 

Conoress. Tlie hear)/ lines across through the 

foot of Lake Micliitian the northern bound- 

ary suauested for those three states if two 

were made to the north 

States as indicated by the black lines on the map. Power was 
reserved, however, to make two or more states out of that 
part of the Territory north of an east and west line through 



78 

the southern point of Lake Michigan, drawn heavy on our 
map. Had this division line been actually held to, Illinois 
and Indiana must have been left without frontage on Lake 
Michigan, and a glance at the map shows that, as the site of 
Chicago would have been withheld from the western state, 
so Ohio would have lost Toledo and the much -prized Maumee 
Bay, though this was not then certainly known, since such 
maps as existed at that time made the line pass well north of 
Toledo. It is not strange that the three southern states should 
have wanted to change the boundaries thus set for them when 
they came to seek admission to the Union. Ohio added a 
little on the north in her own constitution of 1802, but failed 
to get it specifically described anew by Congress, Indiana 
added rather more when she was admitted in 1816, and Illi- 
nois still more on her admission in 1S18. The feeling was 
strong that Michigan had an enormous coast line from which 
she could easily spare a little to them. Yet their action was 
in plain violation of the Ordinance of 1787, laying out the 
original lines, as well as of subsequent acts of Congress. In 
1837, when Michigan was seeking admission to statehood, 
the dispute over the boundary with Ohio led to much anxiety 
and the period of excitement exaggeratedly called the Toledo 
War. 

The way in which little communities of men with organ- 
ized local government spread over this region may be seen on 
Fig. 64. The counties colored darkest were organized before 
1810. Of Michigan there was at that time only Wayne 
County. Of course that meant that governmental affairs for 
the whole region had to be transacted at Detroit, the only 
considerable settlement. By 1830 Chippewa and Mackinac 
were added and the counties adjoining Wayne. Between 1830 
and 1850 the state was admitted to the Union and a consider- 
able movement ol people took place into the country between 
Detroit and the Saginaw Valley and the extraction of copper 
was begun in Houghton countv. Can you see evidences of 
these things in the diagram? It was at this same period that 
Wisconsin, too, had its greatest expansion. In Ontario set- 



79 

tlemeirt was earlier but slower to spread. In the years from 
1850 to 1870 people spread along the shores of the lower pen- 
insula and iron in Marquette and lumber in Menominee began 
to be sought for actively. In 1890 there remained unorgan- 




FlG. 64. 



Date ofortinnhAnu amaty government; bl'irk. organized before ISIO. Iicav;/ 
lines before 18S0, light lines before 1840. dotted before 1870 



ized only Oscoda and Ogemaw in the lower peninsula and Iron 
in the upper. This was added in 1891, the last county in the 
state. North of Lake Superior and Georgian Bay Ontario has 
all its territory still governed as territorial districts. 

Nearly a quarter of the people of Michigan were born in for- 
eign countries, nearly half of them in some British territory and 
a quarter more in Germany. Six per cent of our people came 
from New York and two per cent each from Pennsylvania and 
Indiana. The distribution of population in the region in 1900 
is shown on the map. (Fig- 65). 



80 



45^o90 




Fig. 65- Populntion of the Lake Country in 1900. Scheme to left gives nionher of 
inhabitants to one square mile 



FISHERIES 

When the white man first came to Michigan it is the 
testimony of all the early writers that the Great Lakes teemed 
with valuable food fish — whitefish, lake herring, lake trout 
and sturgeon. Brook trout abounded in the upper penin- 
sula and in the coast streams of the lower peninsula from 
Mackinaw to Traverse City in Lake Michigan and to Rogers 
City on the Lake Huron shore. Grayling were common in 
streams still further south. 

The excellence and abundance of the native fish is a fre- 
quent theme in early days. The store was indeed inexhaust- 
ible for the first thin population. Following Michigan's 
admission to statehood, however, settlers came steadily pour- 
ing in, and so in all the lake states. There has been no 
interruption to this growth of population from that day to this. 



81 

The ease of capture joined with the excellent quality and 
abundance of the fish exposed this resource of the lakes to 
heavy inroads. Before 1880 trout and graylino^ were driven 
from many streams by lumbering operations, the discharge of 
sawdust alone rendering many rivers unfit for fish and spoiling 
not a few fishing grounds on the Great Lakes themselves. Of 
the Great Lake fisheries in general they were getting "played 
out" in 1878. About the year 1850 the pound or trap net 
was introduced, a device consistingof a fence or wall-like net, 
reaching out from the shore sometimes two or three miles into 
the lakes, that intercepted the fish as they swam along paral- 
lel to the shore, guided them outward to a pound or trap 
whence they were lifted by the fisherman at his leisure. This 
proved the most destructive of fishing devices and has been 
held largely responsible for the rapid decline of the fisheries. 
The rough estimates available for the earlier years put the 
catch of 1830, seven years before Michigan became a state, at 
8,000 barrels; of 1857, at 13,500 barrels; of 1857, at over 
80,000 barrels, valued at $640,000. In 1885 the value of the 
catch had passed one and a half million dollars. The same 
thing was going on in the waters of other American states and 
of Canada. It has been well said that the commercial fish 
never had a chance. In 1878 the fishermen had to set their 
nets twenty, thirty and even forty miles from shore and not so 
good lifts were had even at those distances as w^ere had a few 
years earlier five or ten miles from shore right in sight from 
city harbors. In 1842 the discovery was made in Europe that 
brook trout could be propagated artifically. Protection of the 
fry during their helpless stage of infancy made it possible to 
place in the streams a new generation vastly outnumbering 
those that nature reared. In 1873 the Michigan Fish Com- 
mission w-as created for the "propagation and cultivation of 
whitefish and such other kinds of the better class of food fishes 
as they may direct." They were given an appropriation of 
$7500 which has now increased to $33,000. They at once 
began their attempt to restock the lakes wdth whitefish, with 
the theory embodied in the following statement: In a state 



82 

of nature from a thousand whitefish eggs not more than one 
survives; artificially 940 may be obtained, iVs one fish yields 
about 25,000 eggs, fish culture gives a whitefish 24,000 
descendants where nature gives her 25. Already in 1874 a 
million and a half young whitefish were "planted," twelve 
and a half million in 1878, fifty million in 1886, a hundred 
million in 1890 and two hundred million in 1892. The results 
of this vast fish nursery were somewhat disappointing, yet in 
1885 small whitefish were becoming abundant in the Lakes, 
presumably the result of the Fish Commission's "plantings," 
especially as they were not observed at unplanted places. But 
the catch of whitefish declined from eight million pounds in 
1891, the first year of statistics that the Commission regards 
as reliable, to six, five, four and little more than three million 
pounds in the four years that followed. Meanwhile the Com- 
mission had taken other fish in hand ; great numbers of eels 
were brought from the Hudson river at Albany and released in 
the lakes, where they were observed to thrive and grow large. 
But the little eels that had been hoped for never appeared ; it 
was evident they reared no families. Presently naturalists 
learned that the eel has to go to salt water to spawn and 
indeed passes the earliest stage of its life in the deep ocean 
waters in a form as little like an eel as a tadpole is to a frog. 
Sturgeon, salmon, brook trout and bass of various kinds 
were successfully reared and planted in lakes and inland 
waters. Here success was as marked as failure had been on 
the lakes. Trout were not only restored to streams once 
completely fished out but introduced to streams all over the 
lower peninsula, which was reported changed (1892) "from 
a land barren in brook trout to one in which good trout fishing 
is abundant, giving farmers food and attracting thousands of 
tourists." Attempts were repeatedly made to domesticate and 
propagate the grayling which was fast disappearing as lumber- 
ing operations advanced in the northern part of the lower pen- 
insula. In this there was no success either in finding them 
spawning in the wild state to obtain eggs to rear or in per- 
suading" them to spawn in captivity. 



83 

Attention was given to the food supply on which the 
whitefish fed to solve the doubt whether the small fish released 
so numerously were able to find a sufficient supply of their 
natural sustenance. From the toothless, sucker-like, down- 
turned jaw of the mature whitefish it was inferred to be a bot- 
tom feeder, as well as from the presence of numerous^ stones 
in its stomach, supposed to have been caught up hastily as it 
took its food. Two-thirds of its food in cases examined in 
the Charlevoix region consisted of two forms of minute life of 
the lakes known as the plankton. These arepontoporeia hoyi 





Fig. 66. Plankinn of ureal lakes on which the whilefish jno'Hihbj feeds-much enlarged 

and mysis relicta, 43 and 20 percent respectively. Of these 
forms of life there was found a great abundance. There 
was certainly food enough to maintain again today 



84 

the teeming multitudes with which the lakes had one 
time swarmed. "If one draws through the water a net 
of finest gauze and collects its gleanings into a 
small glass there will be seen a myriad of minute forms almost 
or quite invisible to the eye. The mass of material obtained 
depends not only upon the length of the haul and size of the 
net, but upon numerous other conditions as well. Under no 
probable circumstances, however, will the net fail to collect a 
certain amount of material which the microscope shows to be 
composed of living organisms of varied character. Among 
these are both plants and animals, the latter so insignificant 
that their own motion does not suffice to carry them over any 
considerable distance, and hence both plants and animals are 
dependent upon waves, currents and winds fortheir wide dis- 
tribution. Their entire existence is passed floating freely in 
the water and both plants and animals possess characters of 
form or structure fitting them for maintaining their position. 
This mass of living forms is known as the plankton. One may 
justly call it tJie primitive food supply of the water, and as 
such it is of course the origin of fish food." There is much 
less plankton it appears in the Great Lakes than in the ocean, 
but abundance to maintain a fish life much greater than now 
exists. Not merely is there plenty of the two forms mysis 
and pontoporeia, and the others on which whitefish 
feed, but the still lower forms in the plankton on 
which these feed. Of the fry it is only known that as soon 
as they absorb the food sac with which they are hatched from 
the ^%^ they are unlike the mature whitefish in having "rap- 
tatorial" teeth with which they dart upon their prey, not on the 
bottom, but free swimming through the water. Just what 
these are is not certainly known, but the fact that captive fry 
greedily chased and ate two copepods, cyclops thomasi and 
diaptomus cicilis suggests at least that their natural food 
resembles these crustaceans. These, too, abound in the Great 
Lake waters. 

It could no longer be doubted that the greater success in 
peopling the streams with trout than the lakes with whitefish 



85 

was due to the protection enjoyed by the former of a close 
season and a legal size below which they might not be caught 
under penalty. The lakes were overfished. While the 
hatcheries were doing all their capacity would admit to replen- 
ish the waters, their work was to a great extent neutralized 
by the persistent catches of immature fish by the fishermen. 
The substitution of steam vessels for sail boats and the intro- 
duction of large capital had resulted in hastening the destruc- 
tion of the whitefish enormously. The establishment of depots 
where the fish might l)e frozen and preserved for future use 
had offered a temptation to those engaged in the business to 
prosecute their work at all seasons of the year. Many locali- 
ties formerly known as good whitefish grounds had by the 
multiplication of methods of capture, been fished to death and 
now made poor return, while many other grounds had been 
wholly abandoned because of their unproductiveness. Still 
more serious was the nature of the catch. It was reported 
from Alpena in 1892 that "tons of immature whitefish were 
taken in the pound nets there, many of them so small that 
they could not be salted, neither could they be put upon the 
market and sold fresh, and as a last resort they were smoked. 
In other cases the fish caught were so small that they could 
only be disposed of to grind up for fertilizers. It was felt that 
if the millions of small fish put in the lakes could escape this 
shameful manner of fishing until they attained a spawning 
age and a commercial size, the fruits of artificial propagation 
might be realized. A detail that was noted in Charlevoix 
waters throws light on what was going on: — The fishermen, 
highly skilled in the practice of their art and easily distinguish- 
ing varieties among the fish they handled that seem quite 
identical to the uninitiated, looked with little tolerance on the 
early labors of the Fish Commission and maintained entire 
incredulity as to the validity of their conclusions. When the 
whitefish, coregonus clupeiformis, began their rapid disappear- 
ance from Charlevoix waters in the years following 1880 the 
fishermen held the fact to be simply that the fish had gone 
away to some other locality. The increasing presence in the 



86 

lake of sawdust from the lumber mills was regarded as a suf- 
ficient cause. But coincident with the "going'' of the true 
whitefish arrived another, sold commonly as a whitefish but 
well known to the fishermen as distinct and named by them 
"longjaw" (coregonus prognaihus) (Fig. 67). The longjaw 
had not been unknown before, it merely became now a greater 
part of the total whitefish catch. Now the true whitefish 
yields the best catches at depths of twelve fathoms or less 
while they are not found at depths of twenty to twenty-five 
fathoms where the longjaws are most abundant. There is no 
evidence that the habits of the two species have changed in 
the period of time considered. The simplest explanation of 
what has occurred would seem to be that as scarcity of the 
whitefish drove the fishermen to set their nets further from 




Fk;. (i7. LonjiJ'iw ]S'hiif'fis/i 



shore it necessarily drove them into deeper and deeper waters. 
The whitefish had been exhausted, not driven away, and the 
longjaws had not come in, but were being caught more because 
the nets were invading the deeper waters wdiere they lived. 
A singular confirmation of this explanation was afforded by 
subsequent experience in the same waters. As the fishermen 
worked further and further away from shore the longjaws in 
turn began to "go away" and gi\'e place to another form, the 
"blackfin" (coregonus nigripinnis) . The black-fin is 

rarely found in depths less than forty fathoms. There 
is no ground to doubt that he has alwavs lived there and is 



87 

caught now first in growing nunil)ers l)ecause the nets have 
again pushed out into deeper waters. 

The writer was present on a fishing trip in 1905 from a 
Canadian port into Lake Huron that gave an idea of how 
strenuous an assault is being made on fish life. It is probably 
a fair example of legal lake fisheries. The little tug steamed 
out at sunrise to a buoy some sixteen miles offshore, marked 
by a red and white flag. It seemed a very obscure object but 
was easily made out by the experienced fishermen. The buoy 
was taken in and its line lifted until the ends of the nets came 
over the rail at 9:30 a. m. From that time till noon the tug 
steamed slowly along, taking up seven miles of net which was 
lifted inboard, net, fish, and all, by a steam- winch patented 
from Charlevoix, Mich. A rod was run through the rear wall 
of the pilot house to the engine room by which the engines of 
the boat and the fish lifter could be stopped and started from 
the pilot house. Here at the door stood one of the crew of 
five with a gaff to help heavy fish over the side but ready to 
stop the engines when needed. Another pulled the net hand 
overhand from the fish lifter and laid it, fish and all, in the 
net boxes as evenly as possible. The rest busied themselves 
freeing fish from the meshes of the net in which they were 
tightly entangled, carrying off boxes filled with fish and net 
and bringing empty ones. There were 56 nets, each 800 feet 
long and eight feet wide, with lead sinkers all along one edge 
and wooden floats along the other. The sinkers were altogether 
too heavy for the floats to lift, but the floats w^ere able to make 
the net stand up on the bottom like a fence, seven miles long 
and eight feet high. Two hundred and thirty-eight fish were 
taken, a third of them whitefish fifteen or twenty inches long 
and weighing from three to six pounds. The fish w^ere liter- 
ally pumped on board by steam, coming over the side from 
one to two a minute, an average of one to every 150 feet of 
net. To take these from the nets, straighten the net, untie 
the nets from each other as a joint came up and lay them and 
the fish in their boxes, called for the incessant activity of all 
hands. Even then the engines had frequently to be stopped. 



Quite as many stones as fish were lifted, mostly jagged bits of 
limestone greatly honeycombed by the solvent action of the 
water and weighing up to ten pounds. These are probably 
entangled in the net by the fish in their struggles to escape 
from the meshes, struggles which are further evidenced by the 
way the net strands are forced into their bodies. A depth of 
sixteen fathoms had been carefully selected by sounding as 
the net was laid. At the end of the line the rush was followed 
by a twenty-minute rest for lunch. Then the tug steamed 
over her course again at a three-mile pace that kept all hands 
on the jump to lay out the net straight and clear so that it 
would stand upright on the bottom. When a "foul" comes 
the engines are stopped and all hands go to work at it till the 
net is clear. At the end of the line, as at the beginning, a 
heavy stone anchors a cedar buoy with pole and flag and the 
net is set. Two other similar lines will keep the tug busy 
tomorrow and the day after. On the third day this will be 
again taken up. From the stake in, all hands clean fish, with 
an occasional turn at engine and wheel. When the landing is 
made the catch is ready for the ice or for sale. 

The hope of the Fish Commission, to maintain a constant 
supply of food fish to the lakes by securing the growth from 
the egg to maturity of as many fish as were annually caught, 
had failed of realization. Much has been said when we state 
that fishing paid so good a return on the capital it employed 
that its appliances improved and the zeal with which it was 
prosecuted increased much too fast for the fish introduced 
into the lakes by the Commission ever to have a chance to 
grow up unless their capture in infancy were legally prevented. 
The Commission is satisfied that a whitefish does not spawn 
before attaining a weight of at least two pounds, yet a million 
pounds of the total of three million pounds caught in 1895 
were individuals weighing less than one and a quarter pounds. 
As a specific example a firm in Grand Haven shipped a barrel 
of whitefish to Detroit which was found to contain between 
twenty-five hundred and 3000 individuals. The shippers 
offered a similar lot every day in the season. The diminishing 



89 

size of the mesh of the nets used contributed much to this 
result. The legal mesh in 1870 had already contracted some 
since earliest days. It was then 4i inches, not open as in use, 
but stretched out to its greatest extent. In 1896 it had 
diminished to 2% inches and illegally nets were doubtless used 
even smaller than this. In 1894 an attempt to pass a law 
enforcing penalty for having in possession whitefish under a 
standard size, met defeat at the hands of the fishermen who 
saw in it rather the present limitation of their catch than the 
protection of their future interests. In 1894 Lake Ontario 
was declared "fished out," while from Lake Erie fishing firms 
were moving to Lake of the Woods at least for summer work. 
The U. S. Fish Commission that year suspended work in 
Lake Erie for lack of whitefish from which spawn could be 
obtained. In 1897 a protective law was at last obtained. It 
was now illegal to use pound nets with meshes of less than 
3^ inches in the pockets, to have the following fish in pos- 
session of less weight than — sturgeon, 15 pounds; whitefish, 
2 pounds; lake trout, ^ pound; walled-eyed pike or pickerel, 
1 pound; catfish, 1 pound; perch, 4 ounces; all in the round, 
to net fish between October 13 and December 15, when the 
whitefish are spawning, to take trout, salmon or grayling 
between September 1 and May 1, to kill them at any time in 
any other way than by fishing with hook and line, to have 
them in possession under 7 inches long, or to have trout or gray- 
ling for sale. The results are regarded as distinctly satisfactory, 
yet the period during which protection has been had is brief and 
the whitefish, to which most attention has been given, shows 
only moderate increase. The average value of the whitefish, 
however, has risen from less than 4 cents per pound in 1892 to 
nearly six cents in 1902. If this result from the elimination 
of the smaller, immature fish it is a great gain. It may merely 
point to an increased demand for the same qualities that were 
formerly cheaper. The herring catch is known to have 
increased with increasing demand. Early statistics are not 
relied on but it is not questioned that whitefish and trout 



v^ ' 



90 

formerly made up much the o^reater part of the total catch. 
Kinds of fish are now caught and sold for which there was 
then no market. The total value of the Great Lake fisheries 
in 1900 was over five million dollars, of which one and a half 
were reported for Michigan. Michigan and Ontario led in 
value of the catch among all the neighboring states. 



H S '07 



